Welcome to Tellwell’s weekly Plog (photo-blog)!
With a short work week, we decided to dive into the holiday season a day early and share some of our team’s favorite Turkey Day classics.
This week’s writer
Sharing our Thanksgiving celebrations
This week, we wanted to share some of Team Tellwell’s family traditions, memories, and more before the holiday season kicks off. We will be back at it, kicking it usual plog style, next week. But for now, let’s see what our team gets up to when Turkey Day rolls around!
Sandy
“We spend every Thanksgiving with my husband Paul’s family. We do a secret Santa each year which is always a hit and a handful of years ago started playing Pass the Parcel (like from Bluey) and that has been a fun tradition that the kids and adults look forward to each year! There’s now 23 of us total and it’s always so much fun!”
Matt
“When my Grandpa Larson would come visit for Thanksgiving, he often brought a jar of pickled herring – it’s kind of like lutefisk, but fancier and actually good in my opinion! Haha!
The day after Thanksgiving would be the day we went to Jan’s Tree Farm and get a Christmas tree. Because, while we like to celebrate Christmas as much as the next guy, we made sure to put up the tree after Thanksgiving because we weren’t sacrilegious!”
Megan
“Growing up, my family always decorated the tree on the night of Thanksgiving after we were home from wherever we were celebrating! It was the only night that we could guarantee all 5 of us would be home and not at a hockey game/practice.
Now, my family plays minute-to-win-it games and Bingo is always the final competition! There are prizes for the winners (because my entire family is ridiculously competitive) but you only get one after you have gobbled like a Turkey around the house following your ‘Bingo!’ If we are really feeling like mixing things up, funny masks and glasses are worn as shown below. It’s chaos and competition, but joyful.”
Kari
“Personally, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday! Thanksgiving is the one holiday we could always bet on having at my childhood home on the North Shore. We cook all day, then always go explore one of our favorite places outdoors: Palisade Head, Gooseberry Falls, whatever we’re feeling in the moment.
One of my favorite memories has to be watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade every year. While most people were excited to see the floats, coming from a family with two band teachers for parents, we got most excited when the marching bands came on screen! It kind of feels like cheering for the Super Bowl commercials instead of the game. There’s nothing my family loves more than music, so I always think very fondly of those mornings!”
Annie
“When I was growing up, we usually celebrated Thanksgiving with my Aunt Penny, Uncle Dick, and my cousins. Now what you need to know is that Penny was a little competitive and also loved a traveling trophy, so she established the tradition of our family playing a new game each year and the winner taking home the Traveling Turkey Day Trophy! She also created said trophy and insisted that it be displayed in a place of honor — which meant that when she won it, it was proudly placed in her living room for the year. And for many years she picked a game that she thought she could win so that she could continue being the reigning Turkey Day Game Champion! It’s a fun and special memory to have, especially since my Aunt Penny passed away. We’ve kept the tradition of playing games alive, though with my younger nieces and nephews it’s harder to find a game we can all realistically compete at for a trophy. So the Turkey Day Trophy now serves as a reminder of our most fun Aunt Penny.”
Jen
“One of our yummy traditions is to make pie. Usually it’s my Dad and I, and in recent years the whole family gets involved, including my son Wesley! We like to make apple pie so we can use the apple peeler-corer-slicer machine. Other times it’s pumpkin pie, and this year we’re going to add in French Silk!
Another memory is when I was younger, we would take needles, thread, dried fruits, popcorn, and nuts and string them together to make a tree necklace of treats for the birds!”