Thanksgiving 2025 Hot Takes

Invite someone you don’t like.

Invite everyone and anyone. Invite your ex, invite your high school bully, invite that guy from the bar last week. Let’s keep things interesting.

Not everyone at Thanksgiving is created equal.

The host runs the show, the kitchen helpers get promoted to co-hosts and everyone else is just a guest. If you’re in that last category, your only job is to be useful: Bring a great bottle, tell a great story, keep the energy up. Showing up with nothing but silence is worse than forgetting dessert.

Don’t come out of the closet on Thanksgiving.

Wait until Christmas or winter break.

Your cousin’s new girlfriend is your ally.

Getting the whole family together can be stressful. Find the guest who knows the least about the dynamics and politics and drama of the people gathered around the table, and get her on your side … quick. You’ll need her support when things go down by dessert.

Everyone should wear name tags. Even if it’s just your family.

It just takes a lot of weirdness out of Thanksgiving. Like who the hell is that, Aunt What?

You’re not going to change anyone’s behavior or beliefs during a Thanksgiving meal, so don’t try.

Put an ashtray out on the porch for Uncle Steve and don’t blink when Cousin Ellie opens a third bottle of wine. That said, let’s not talk politics.

Go ahead, talk politics.

I need you to manage your time better.

I don’t feel like Meemaw needs to be cooking and throwing down at 80-something years old. Please, Meemaw, sit down. But I think y’all forgot that people were cooking for two days, up until this morning. If I wake up and you say you’re starting the mac and cheese — you’re about to boil noodles, you’re about to grate cheese — I already know it’s going to be a flop.

Just eat at 7:30.

Eat at a normal dinner hour and magically find yourself with four more hours to prep the meal, linger over a relaxed happy hour (with bhel puri!) and, most importantly, enjoy your day off.

Do not make me deal with the flowers you decided to bring without a vase.

Or the side dish you have to assemble in my kitchen before we eat, the cream you have to whip for your pie or your cousin’s food allergy, especially since I didn’t invite her in the first place.

You will regret wearing anything with a waistband.

I’ve learned this lesson countless times before but then get excited about an outfit that involves tights. It must be some bizarre form of self punishment, and I’ll look into this with my therapist. The tights become annoying on the drive over, fully painful a few hours in and eventually discarded in my purse by the end of the day. This year, I swear on all that is holy, I will wear a sack dress with no tights.

Candles are essential for the mood — but they must be unscented.

Nothing ruins gravy like eau de pumpkin latte drifting over the table.

You need a timeline, and it needs to be handwritten.

The result should be a detailed outline of everything you need to do from start (shopping) to finish (winning all the Best Thanksgiving awards). I even like to include when I’m showering, but that’s just me.

You don’t want to enter these athletic, long meals having already eaten six ounces of cheese.

It always bothers me when people put out a cheese board. It’s just so easy to fill up on crackers and bread. That could be something with dessert — or the dessert.

The playlist is as important as the mashed potatoes.

I’m talking Sade, Fleetwood Mac, a little Mariah. Set the tone — don’t kill it with a random Spotify algorithm.

If you have more than four people at the table, there shouldn’t be music playing during the meal.

Thanksgiving is different when your team’s playing.

Once the football games are on, I’m smashing parlays. I’m up super early to prepare the meal, but that thing is on the table hot at the beginning of the first game. It’s on everybody else after that.

It doesn’t make you a martyr to not accept help.

Be OK with asking for and receiving it. I promise it won’t make the food taste better if you told me you’ve been on your feet for 18 hours and you have not eaten.

Thanksgiving is the best possible time to learn a new card game.

Grab a deck; scrap the jokers. Pick a card — don’t look! — and stick it on your forehead. Pick a category (domestic beers, rom-coms, Thanksgiving sides). Everyone else must get you to guess the card rank by naming an item in that category that think matches how you would rate it: A two means you hate it, an eight is somewhere in the middle, an ace means you’re obsessed with it, so on. Once everyone gives it a shot, you guess the card. If you get it right, everyone else has to drink, and if you’re wrong, bottoms up.

Don’t make me learn a new game.

This should be the least formal scenario you can imagine.

I think there’s something that gets un-fun when it’s this kind of forced ritual of getting dressed up or you must sit in a certain place.

It’s important to get a little bit high between dinner and dessert.

Self-explanatory.

Marshmallows should not be on vegetables.

Hot sauce should be on everything.

Everything that gravy or cranberry sauce can go on, hot sauce is good for. You need the acidity — it allows you to not eat salad. The variety of hot sauce of course matters: something ultra-vinegary, like Crystal.

Stuffing and dressing? Please get that [expletive] away from me.

I do love a panzanella. And if my bun gets a little wet at Five Guys, sure. But dressing? *Gags.*

Stuffing should be an everyday carb, understood in the same breath as baguette, buttered rice or polenta.

My mother sends me the freeze-dried supermarket kind, which comes together with hot water and butter in less than a minute. I eat it all the time — it’s great with an over-easy egg for breakfast or spooned straight from a mug.

Stuffing is better cold, from the fridge, at 2 a.m. on Friday.

It’s important to cook stuffing inside the bird.

I know this presents risks, but in life we do many things that could be bad for us, because they’re intensely pleasurable. Like drugs and “MILF Manor!” (Editor’s note: We do not recommend any of this.)

There should be at least two forms of potatoes.

Preferably scalloped and mashed. The people want potatoes.

The sides are the meal.

Turkey will only ever be so good, so manage your expectations and put your effort in the right place.

Don’t rewrite the menu!

It’s so impressive when a cook makes all the same things as they did last year, and every year they make those dishes incrementally better.

Pick at least one or two new dishes to tackle.

Everyone says don’t attempt a new recipe on such an important holiday. But if you’re someone who truly enjoys the cooking part of a cooking holiday, do this for yourself. It keeps things fresh, and you never know what might make it into your family’s Thanksgiving repertoire. In mine, it’s Swedish meatballs and a pecan kale salad. That’s how traditions are formed.

A lot of people will die on the hill that everything needs to be from scratch. Why would you do that?

In this economy, our most valuable currency is time.

The best bread for stuffing is challah, and anyone who says otherwise hates the roof of their mouth.

And while we’re at it: Make the challah from scratch!

Gravy should be made with drippings, not from a sauce packet.

Also, your gravy is probably undersalted.

The best turkey is a duck.

The best turkey is two chickens.

More manageable to fit in your fridge, to hoist from the oven and to carve. And once they’re artfully arranged on a platter, will anyone really detect the difference? Well, maybe yes, because the meat will be juicier.

The only respectable way to prepare a turkey is to deep-fry it.

Common sense is the main ingredient, and the water displacement method is your friend. Embrace both. And when your oven unexpectedly breaks during the parade, you’ll be better for it. I speak from experience.

Turkey is better as a sandwich.

Your turkey can be a lasagna.

Or, like, a huge cassoulet. It does not matter what the centerpiece is, so long as you enjoy it, and its preparation does not engender an afternoon’s worth of anxiety. I’ve seen too much sweat expended in the name of cooking a fickle, dry bird to perfection in an erratic oven to think that there’s not a better way. In this, as in all things, joy should trump tradition.

If you can’t cook, just order from your neighborhood barbecue place.

There’s no shame in that. That’s actually an act of self-awareness. Though, once, I saw somebody pull out a bag of Hormel ribs they bought — premarinated, maybe even precooked. That’s diabolical. It’s not right.

White meat is better.

And yeah, baby, it’s dry. That’s what gravy is for!

Don’t serve meat at all.

It’ll make your life 10 times easier and dinner will be as delicious — maybe more.

Stop with the spatchcocking.

Does spatchcocking give you the most technically perfect turkey meat? Probably. But it will also give you a flat bird. What is the fun in a flat bird?

Carving at the table is pure pageantry.

The drama, the knives, the oohs and ahhs — all for lukewarm slices of breast meat. Do it in the kitchen, where you can actually make it neat, then bring out a platter that looks intentional.

It’s really not about the food.

Sorry. If it was about the food we would have evolved to be cooking something more exciting than turkey, the driest possible bird. Like porchetta!

Tiramisù is a better Thanksgiving dessert than pecan pie.

Pecan pie is far too sweet, a one-note, often sludgy mess of corn syrup and sugar that no amount of salt or whip can rescue. After a feast, I prefer something light and easily portionable. Tiramisù is airy, easy to make in advance, spoonable and has just enough caffeine to combat the post-turkey slump.

Thanksgiving is the only appropriate time of year to eat pecan pie, really.

I probably shouldn’t say this because I’m a pastry chef, but dessert at Thanksgiving is done all wrong.

I take inspiration from big Chinese banquet-style eating. Dessert might be a fruit plate or a square of coconut Jell-O, but what they all have in common is that they’re refreshing, light desserts that provide relief. You can still excite the senses with a dramatic fruit plate.

If someone wants to have pumpkin pie on the table, they better bring it, because I’m not making it.

No requests, only results.

Please have something special for your sober guests that is not Martinelli’s or LaCroix.

You must have chocolate for dessert.

Pumpkin spice is so over.

The pies really make the meal. It brings it all together.

Pie is usually not that good.

… and really underbaked 95 percent of the time.

Be the person who brings the Magnum.

It looks like an instant party, because it is.

Make a panna cotta. Don’t bake a pie.

Bring something that’s fun and exciting and new. Bring a chocolate cake!

An average pie beats a good turkey.

Bake so many pies that you have up to one pie per person.

There’s never been too many pies.

Make one pie … and save it for the next day.

Pie is better the day after, because you’re not forcing it down.

Always make someone else bring the pies.

If you make a pitcher of manhattans, please make sure to kiddie-proof all sharp corners in the common areas of your home.

This is not as much a hot take as it is advice from someone who learned it the hard way.