12 New Thanksgiving 'Traditions' You Should Adopt This Year

When you’re a child, it feels like family holiday traditions are sacrosanct—that they were passed down on stone tablets and must be slavishly adhered to lest ruin befall the family (or mom get mad, anyway). But I’m sure you’ve learned by now that family traditions were just something your folks decided to do one year because it was easier that way.

That knowledge might be a little disillusioning, but it also opens up a world of possibility. You can make up your own of new ways of experiencing Thanksgiving, and as long as they’re done more than once, you can call them traditions, and you can be the one who gets mad if they’re aren’t done. Here are 12 suggestions to get you started.

If you’re hosting Thanksgiving dinner, use the occasion to practice radical self-honesty: ask yourself if you’re actually good at cooking, and ask whether you genuinely enjoying preparing food for a large group of people with high expectations. If the answer to either question is “no,” leave meal-prep to the professionals. You could hire a caterer, if you’re fancy, or you could purchase a ready-made thanksgiving meal from the local supermarket or restaurant. If you’re sneaky, you can even pretend you made it all yourself, and accept all compliments with a semi-smug “I did it for the family” look.

Kids love the solemnity and reassurance of family traditions, and you can take advantage of that. If you start when they’re young enough, you can convince children that literally anything is a Thanksgiving tradition, so tell them that deep-cleaning the baseboards or painting the garage is how Thanksgiving has always been celebrated. Make up a little story about how the Pilgrims had to clean the colony before Squanto visited or something; it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to get them to associate domestic labor with Thanksgiving traditions.

When I was a kid, my Aunt Mimi would start Thanksgiving dinner every year by serving everyone a small helping of rice as a way of remembering the people in the world who had little to eat that night. I’m not sure how it helped alleviate world hunger, but I did enjoy the injection of a little pathos into Thanksgiving, and thinking, “Better them than me!”

Family is an important part of Thanksgiving, but many of us genuinely dislike our biological families, and Thanksgiving is a yearly emotional gauntlet in which ancient grudges are nursed, grievances aired, and tears shed, whether openly at the table, or quietly in the guest bathroom.

If that’s you, you can skip the whole damn thing. It will take courage, because mom will not be happy, but bailing on the family Thanksgiving to hang out with your friends is only really difficult the first time you do it. It gets progressively easier every year after, as your “Friendsgiving” is accepted as a tradition.

If you’re into radically rethinking Thanksgiving, ditch turkey altogether.

Yes, it’s the traditional food that holds the holiday meal together, but turkey isn’t actually all that great as main course—have you ever ordered turkey in a restaurant when there was another choice? Me neither. So instead, serve something else. I suggest steak. Wouldn’t your guests rather eat a perfectly grilled T-Bone than some dry old turkey?

(Personal disclosure: I suggest steak instead of turkey every year at Thanksgiving, and every year I’m told, “Don’t be ridiculous.”)

Not everyone likes football, so consider streaming The Lord of the Rings to the living room TV on Thanksgiving instead. It’s the greatest movie trilogy ever, and surely your family would prefer watching the epic clash between the noble Fellowship of the Ring and the evil Sauron over some dumb football contest between the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys. I mean, they’re not even actual giants! Or cowboys!

On second thought, don’t do this. Everyone wants to watch the game except you and your weird cousin, and it’s not an argument you are going to win.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s “masking” and cross-dressing was the way kids celebrated Thanksgiving, especially in New York City. It’s time we brought it back.

According to a 1909 edition of Appleton’s Magazine, children would purchase “hideous and terrifying false faces, or ‘dough faces’” at NYC candy stores, and on Thanksgiving day, the streets were “filled with urchins in motley, with blackened faces or grotesque masks.”

The favorite costume of boys was “the worn out fineries of their sisters,” and the preferred activity was to “swarm about in the street in groups or parties, parading to the music of tin cans, importuning passer-by for pennies, or gamboling in awkward mimicry of their sisters to the casual street piano.”

This sounds like a lot more fun than trying to cook a mashed potatoes while awkwardly explaining your decision to drop out of college to Uncle Lou.

You might think that gamboling down to your local homeless shelter to dole out green-beans to unhoused people would be an altruistic Thanksgiving activity, but it isn’t. Your heart is in the right place, but you’re not the only person who has this idea: Thanksgiving is the one day a year when many meal-centers for the indigent have too many volunteers. So instead of doing service on Turkey Day, set your calendar for a visit to a shelter in a week or two, when they’ll actually need you.

I stole this one from Town and Country’s list of Thanksgiving traditions because it’s such a great idea. Thanksgiving with family or friends can be a lot to deal with, especially for introverts, so set a time of day where everyone can put aside cooking and cleaning, and just hang out, doing their own thing, either with a group or alone. Which brings me to my next Thanksgiving tradition…

Getting drunk on Turkey Day dates back to Puritans guzzling hard cider at the very first Thanksgiving, and now that smoking weed is acceptable and legal (in some states), it’s time for weed to take its place among Thanksgiving traditions. So make 2022 the year that the time-honored underground tradition of taking a walk with your cool cousin and coming back to the family maelstrom more relaxed and open-minded goes mainstream.

The lull between dinner and pie is the perfect time to announce, “I’m going to go get high now. Come join me if you want,” to the entire table. I bet at least one old auntie will surprise you by leaping up and saying, “Finally, something to be thankful for.”