Hosting your first Thanksgiving dinner can feel like a major undertaking, especially if you’re prepared. Having begun the tradition of doing it myself just last year, I feel uniquely qualified to reflect on the process and what tips and tricks will help you survive your first year hosting.
Tips for Hosting Your First Thanksgiving Dinner
1. Clearly define individual duties prior to the day
As Darcy Lockman’s latest book attests, young, working couples often struggle to divide up domestic duties, especially once they have children. When it comes to the holidays, working out those divisions, even temporarily, will take tremendous tension off of your plate, help your partner feel engaged in the preparations, and set a possible pattern for the future. Even if you’re a stay-at-home spouse, you will need help pulling off this event, so make sure your partner understands what you need from them.
2. Don’t be afraid to ask for recipes
Some people are brilliant in the kitchen and can just be unleashed on a turkey, a pile of potatoes, and a spice cabinet. For the rest of us, recipes are the bread and butter of Thanksgiving dinner prep.
There are tons of great blogs with rating systems to help you choose strong candidates, but don’t forget your family and friends. If there’s a particularly delicious dish you remember having at another dinner, ask them for the recipe. Not only will most people be flattered you ask, but they’ll be able to tell you what is most likely to go wrong and how to prevent it.
3. Triple check your grocery list
For your grocery list, it is helpful to list all of the ingredients from the recipe on one sheet of paper. Once all of the ingredients are listed, you can compile them. For example, if one recipe requires 2 lemons and another requires 1, you can list three lemons on your fresh list. The extra stage may seem insane, but drastically reduces your chances of ending up a lemon short.
When you compile the list, have mercy on the person who will be doing the grocery shopping, even if it’s going to be you. List the items by category in the order you would find them walking through the store. It doesn’t have to be exact, but it will help them track down some of the more bizarre ingredients. That alone will save you a bunch of calls from the grocery store insisting that the item doesn’t exist.
4. Keep Clean-Up Organized
Recyclable plastic ware will never look as good as at the end of a major family dinner. There are quite a few nice-looking options, but whether you go with disposable plates or your grandmother’s best china, you’ll need to keep dishes under control starting early in the day.
This is a great place to enlist your partner’s help by having them keep you company and cleaning as you cook. Not only will you get to spend the holiday helping each other in true Thanksgiving fashion, but you’ll stay ahead of that mass of dishes constantly trying to consume your kitchen.
Make sure you have plenty of clean kitchen towels and a laundry bin ready to go. If you’ve got quartz countertops, they will be a breeze to clean; however, you will still find yourself doing it frequently in between dishes. You can throw whatever you want on them pretty much, but make sure you have plenty of potholders available to protect them from extreme heat.
5. Time Everything
The turkey will, undoubtedly, be the first thing to go into your oven, but it is important to make sure you have a list of the times that everything else needs to go in the oven if they are going to be ready at the same time.
Don’t forget that you will not want everything done right when the turkey is. The turkey should sit for forty-five minutes before you start carving it. If you don’t wait, you’ll lose a lot of the moisture from your meal, resulting in a very dry turkey.
6. Buy Wine
It can be any drink you fancy, but I would suggest staying away from hard alcohol as you’ll be in the kitchen for approximately four hours sipping away. If you don’t drink alcoholic beverages, then hot cocoa or a soothing tea are great substitutes. Essentially, find something yummy that will help you relax as you push through this challenging day.
7. Set Kitchen Boundaries
We all have a mother, mother-in-law, or less than a favorite uncle who doesn’t respect boundaries. Make yours very clear and have a trusted partner to help you enforce them. If you want the kitchen to yourself once everyone shows up, tell them. If you don’t want that random relative reaching onto your cutting board while you’re carving the turkey, then tell them. There may be some momentary hurt feelings, but you just need to have a rational explanation ready. If they don’t like it, then kindly suggest that their house would be a wonderful place for the following Thanksgiving dinner.