From Sheri & Bob Stritof,
Your Guide to Marriage.
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For many families, Thanksgiving Day is a time for families and friends to reunite, to watch football games and Thanksgiving Day parades, consume lots and lots of traditional Thanksgiving Day foods, and to remember and share old stories and experiences.

Put Your Relationship First

The most important thing the two of you can do to make your Thanksgiving Day holiday a joyous and stress free occasion is to put your relationship with one another first.

• Stand together and support one another as you communicate your holiday decisions to your families and friends.

• When making decisions about where to go, who to see, and how to spend the day, remember to make decisions together that are life-giving to your marriage.

Make Thanksgiving Less Chaotic and More Meaningful

If Thanksgiving Day for the two of you doesn't match that ideal and is a day of stress and turmoil in your marriage, check out some of these ideas for making the holiday both more meaningful and less chaotic.

• Consider having your own Thanksgiving Day dinner alone. Then join your families later for dessert.

• If you really don't want to choose between which family to spend the holiday with, then get away together. You don't have to go far away. There are probably some great resorts near your home that have holiday packages that include a romantic place to stay and Thanksgiving dinner.

• You can also get away as a family if you have children. We had a great Thanksgiving dinner with our four kids at Cinderella's Castle in Disney World. Years later, the kids still talk about the wonderful stress free time we had as a family that holiday.

• If you are in an interfaith marriage, rather than saying grace at dinner, you could have a moment of silence before eating, or have everyone at the table share something they are thankful for.

• Sometime during the day, take a nap or a break from the festivities.

• When the two of you are alone together, share the blessings you each feel in your marriage.

• If the two of you are hosting a Thanksgiving Day dinner, remember to try and keep balance in your lives.

• Don't strive for perfection in either the way your home looks, the way your kids behave, or the way the meal turns out.

• Decide together on who will do what when it comes to the straightening the house, planning, preparation, cooking, and clean up responsibilities.

• Look for ways to go beyond the inner circle of yourselves and your families by taking canned foods to church or a local food bank, or helping to distribute hot meals on Thanksgiving Day.

• Tell a story from your past Thanksgiving celebrations to each other.

• Have a blessing basket with slips of paper and pens available for everyone to write down ways they feel they have been blessed this past year. Sometime during the day, ask everyone to share what they wrote, but don't force this on anyone.

• Play board or card games.

• Take a walk together.

• Make sure you have some quiet time during the day.

• Watch a favorite holiday movie together.

• Do the unexpected and ask all your guests to work on a simple craft project.
  Make copies of a turkey, then have kids and adults punch lots of paper dots from folded colored construction paper, and glue the little dots on the paper turkey. It's not too messy! You will need:
  • Construction Paper
    
  • orange, brown, yellow, red, black
    
  • Glue stick or white glue
    
  • Turkey pattern
    
  • Paper punch

  History of Thanksgiving Day