Recreating Thanksgiving Activities Virtually, part 2

The Thanksgiving booklets have arrived!  And, just in time because my brother was asking for my mother’s stuffing recipe, which is included in the booklet.  He is thrilled to have her recipe because, together with turkey and mashed potatoes, our mother’s stuffing is the key dish we crave on Thanksgiving.  He also said his kids enjoyed seeing the pictures from Thanksgivings past – even the ones from before they were born.

Puzzles have also been arriving at each household, courtesy of my mom.  I thought she was just sending puzzles to the younger children, but we received a surprise Yankee Stadium puzzle, which we plan to tackle beginning today. 

We’ve created our Google form for everyone to submit their “I’m thankful for…”, which I will then e-mail out randomly to be read on Thanksgiving during our Zoom.  Each family member will receive one “I’m thankful” to read over Zoom, then the rest of us will guess who wrote it.  This year, we added in a bonus challenge of crafting a 6 word “I’m thankful” in addition to our traditional longer version, based on the recent piece in The New York Times.

We are also e-mailing out instructions for one of our favorite card games, Liverpool, plus more Thanksgiving pictures, and the Zoom link.  We are asking each household to log into the Zoom call with several different devices, so we can break into rooms to play games or just talk.  My mom included some kid-friendly activities in the e-mail, including a reminder about her apple decorating tradition as an added activity for the kids.

We included the rules for our favorite Dictionary game in the booklet and reminded everyone to have a dictionary on hand for our Zoom.  We will use the private chat feature for everyone to submit their “definitions” and then the group chat feature for everyone to vote.  Even if we only make it through a few rounds, we think it will be lots of fun just to try to make it work virtually.  We have a video from a Dictionary game round at a previous Thanksgiving, which we will share as part of our Thanksgiving Zoom.  The definitions range from silly to outrageous, so it takes us quite a while to get through a round of the game because we are all laughing so much.  Hoping we can recreate some of that fun on Thursday!