Every holiday comes with it's own traditions. For example, my family always goes to church on Easter. Or when I was younger, my dad would always make waffles with blueberries, strawberries, and whipped cream the morning of the 4th of July. So, with the holiday's upon us, I thought it would be fun to share some of the traditions my family has established over the years for Thanksgiving.
1) Food
Well obviously turkey is a given for this holiday but two foods that we also cook are Sarma and Nachinki. My mom is Russian and my dad is Armenian so we like to bring that in to our Thanksgiving holiday with these foods. My dad makes the Sarma. It's rice and beef wrapped in grape leaves and boiled in water and lemon juice. It sounds kind of disgusting but those babies fly off the plate when they come out. They are one of my favorite Thanksgiving dishes! The other dish, Nachinki (I'm probably butchering the spelling on both names but whatever), is made by my Aunt on my mom's side. Nachinki is basically a puff pastry filled with mashed potatos and meat, normally beef. It's pretty bland, but then again, most Russian food is kind of bland. But it's still really good. Very filling, but really good!
2) Dinner
For the longest time, my family has always gone around the table and everyone would say one thing they are thankful for, which we still do. But something that we've added over the most recent years is that each person needs to come up with a thought-provoking question to ask the table. Then we go around and answer (my family is very bad at dinner conversation so my mom started doing this to try and get us to have an actual conversation at the table instead of fun and witty banter between all of us, which we still do).
3) Turkey
Recently my dad has been taking over the honored role of cooking the beloved turkey (funny story, we burnt our last turkey to a CRISP because of a slight mishap...picture below). Other than that one incident though, my dad cooks really good turkey. But the reason I'm mentioning this is because my dad carves the turkey. I feel like cooking the turkey is important but carving the turkey is the key! Whoever carves the turkey has the potential to completely butcher it and make an absolute mess of the whole situation. I mean you can't have some of the dark meat blending in to a slice of white meat (not that blending is bad or anything, they are just their own forms of meat). So the honored role of CARVING the turkey is left to my dad.
Those are the traditions we have in our family Thanksgiving. I'd love to hear your traditions in the comments below to see if there's anything new we can add to our traditions list! Have a Happy Thanksgiving!!!