Gobble Gobble
As holidays go, Thanksgiving can be a weird one. There’s a downright shocking amount of food, and if you’re unlucky, one relative that tries to get everyone to say what they’re thankful for while everyone tries to watch football. Beyond the basics, there are some pretty weird traditions out there—does your family take part in any of these?
Canned Cranberry Sauce
What’s the point of making an entire meal, with a whole roast turkey and sides from scratch, if you’re going to get your cranberry sauce from a can? There are myriad reasons why this one is weird. For one, cranberry sauce is incredibly easy to make, needs just a few ingredients, and can be made ahead.
For our money, what’s really weird is when families insist the canned stuff is the tradition—and bonus points for serving it still in the shape of the can.
Cracking A Wishbone
This tradition actually dates back to ancient Rome, if you can believe it. But the reason that it’s weird is that you can’t actually break it properly until the bone is dry, which takes at least a day. Meaning if you and grandpa are splitting it, but he’s driving home after dinner, you’re on your own.
Deep-Fried Turkey
This one we can understand. Everything tastes better deep fried. It’s more that a lot of people don’t seem to know the proper safety around deep frying, especially something so large, which leaves a lot of room for some extremely dangerous error—as the many videos of turkey fires on YouTube can attest.
Christina Telep, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
The Turkey Toss
Perhaps it was those same videos of flaming turkeys that inspired Indianapolis’ traditional Turkey Toss. Every year, people attach their turkey to a chain, put it in baby clothing, light it on fire, spin around swinging the chain, and attempt to fling it as far as possible.
As you can imagine, it’s quite the spectacle.
Black Friday
Thanksgiving is a time for being together and reflecting on the things that really matter: family, home, the bonding ritual of a good meal shared together and our immense gratitude for all of the aforementioned things. And then, when that’s done, you can line up in the cold and dark and fight a stranger over a discounted toy your kid will forget about within a year.
Honestly, whoever invented Black Friday needs to be in a Hall of Shame.
Turducken
Thanksgiving is already a monument to overconsumption, with the average American consuming 3,000 calories at the festive meal. But at some point in the 80s, either a chef or a butcher—the stories differ—decided to take it up a notch and stuff a duck into a chicken into a turkey—and the turducken was born.
Having a roast turkey is already special enough—the extra layers of meat are superfluous.
Jessica and Lon Binder, Flickr
Ragamuffin Day
This early 20th tradition stemmed from earlier Thanksgiving celebrations where adults and kids alike dressed up in disguises, including masks. This turned into Ragamuffin Day, where children would dress up and visit neighbors, asking “Anything for Thanksgiving”? They’d then be given a penny, a piece of candy, or an apple—so, proto-trick-or-treating.
As Halloween rose in popularity in the 40s and 50s, Ragamuffin Day fell out of favor.
Everything Is Oven-Baked
Among all the traditional “American” Thanksgiving foods, a whole lot of them—turkey, stuffing, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, and even cornbread or warmed-up rolls, to say nothing of say, roasted carrots—need to be baked in the oven. While it makes sense for a busy household, I don’t know anyone who has the oven capacity to make a full dinner and serve everything warm.
Marshmallows
Speaking of sweet potato casserole—the fact that the traditional American recipe for it includes a layer of marshmallows on top is absolutely perplexing. I’m not above mixing salty or savory and sweet, but marshmallows have absolutely no place on the dinner table.
The Turkey Pardon
The ceremony of presenting the President of the United States with a turkey for Thanksgiving goes all the way back to 1947. But it was President Ronald Reagan who first decided to give one of the turkeys a “pardon,” saving it from its holiday doom. During George HW Bush’s presidency, he established it as annual tradition. The only question is…what happens to the pardoned turkey? Do they really live happily ever after?
The U.S. National Archives, Picryl
Turkey Trot
Every years, thousands of people wake up to get up there and do a 5K run before they meet with family for Thanksgiving dinner. It makes sense to balance it out, right? So why is it bizarre? Well, many of them are dressed as turkeys. Beyond the weirdness of dressing up as the animal you’re going to eat, there’s the fact that most of these costumes and accessories aren’t exactly sweat-wicking technical fabric like you’d want from your running clothes.
Nothing says “Come in for a hug, grandma” like the stench of sweaty polyester.
Frozen Turkey Bowling
One popular Thanksgiving tradition at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse is frozen turkey bowling, where participants—you guessed it—bowl a frozen turkey down a supermarket aisle at a set of pins. It’s a fundraiser, too—but not for local food banks or lonely seniors or anything cause you might associate with Thanksgiving. No, it raises money to combat smoking. Sure, still a worthy cause…but also an interesting choice.
Carving The Turkey
We’re not just talking about the actual act of carving the turkey. We’re talking about the stereotypical ritual where the male “head of the household” gets the turkey at the head of the table and uses his carving tools and everyone oohs and aahs….even though, in many cases, he did not cook it, nor does he know how to actually carve poultry.
The 50s called, they want their weird tradition back.
Alternative Stuffing
This is one we didn’t know about until we hit the depths of the internet…in the search for the best stuffing recipe, home cooks have thrown a lot of things at the wall. But a new generation has recently been proudly posting about stuffing with a cereal base…and we’re not talking whole-grain bread. No, some home cooks have bravely been stuffing their turkeys with cornflakes…and even Cap’n Crunch. What’s next, Lucky Charms?
Turkey And Gravy Soda
In the race toward making weird food, there’s been some wild entries from our junk food overlords, including Thanksgiving dinner-flavored Lays chips and Jelly Belly jelly beans, each of which sought to combine all the flavors of the meal in one weird little package. But the one that always blows us away is the novelty Jones Soda Turkey and Gravy flavor.
One reviewer said it was like drinking saline solution.
