Favorite holiday traditions

It is not met to be humbug since my mom died from bone cancer in Jan of 2006 the holidays are not the holidays anymore but my wife and I are going to cracker barrel and watch the she wood burn

As I age I now know the feeling of your children coming home for the holidays and thankful they love to come and visit. It's a blessing to see my family progress and as my wife is laid up with a broken ankle this year I have two awesome daughters to pick up the mantle of cooking for her. To this I am Thankful. Happy Thanksgiving to you all and we at Straight Jacket hope you have a blessed holiday season.

Growing up back East we always went pheasant and rabbit hunting on Thanksgiving morning and then to a family member for Thanksgiving dinner in the afternoon. Here in Idaho for the last 47 years I started taking my sons deer hunting with me on Thanksgiving morning and the tradition is still going as now my grandkids go also and then Thanksgiving dinner in the afternoon at a relatives house that stayed home and prepared the meal.

Chris said:

It's the holiday season. Do you have any favorite holiday traditions you'd like to share with us? I'd love to get to know some of yall a bit more, so trying to encourage great conversation within the community.

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I like to use my time in the field hunting and when not doing that spending time with my two daughters and their families during xmas we also like to see in newer as its a big thing here in Scotland so I wish you all best wishes and good hunting over Xmas and a great new year for 2025

Hunt or fish in the morning, eat way too much, hunt the afternoon. Friday morning, get up and hunt or fish. Lunch start getting set up for the neighborhood oyster roast I host with a buddy.

At Thanksgiving, we do the standard family get together and meals.

We struggle with the urge to get back into the woods as the Texas whitetail season is not even half way done (not including periods of primitive methods only).

But we have to stay home Friday to watch A&M Beat the Hell Outta (BTHO) of the 2nd largest university in our state which we call t.u.



Being that I'm not a native to Texas, I will also watch my childhood NFL team, who just happens to be coached by a former A&M TE and whose Defense is coached by one of the best CBs to play for our Wreckin' Crew defense.



For Christmas Eve, it has become tradition to reverse sear the backstrap of a cow (aka ny strip roast) which is served with a Poblano pepper creme fraische.

And I continue to ask Santa that LRH will send me notificaitons of watched posts where I can actually see what the update was when I look at the email, rather than requiring me to follow the link in the email to see what the update actually was.

We do one of the two big feasts (Thanksgiving or Christmas) as a cooking experiment. We pick a regional cuisine we've never cooked a big meal in, go out and buy a cookbook for it, and do the feast in that style. We've done Moroccan, Ukrainian, Scottish, Northern Spain, English, French provincial, English, Northern German, and Guatemalan.

Every year we celebrate Thanksgiving in the mountains helping youth on cow elk hunts. I have a few buddies and we all have kids. In New Mexico if a kid doesn't draw a tag then they can buy a youth encouragement elk tag. This year, my son drew an antelope tag so he wasn't able to get the cow elk tag but my other buddies still were able to get their kids tags and we all still go and have dinner in the mountains. Get up early and then go hunt.

Just a few pics over the years of my son and his cow elk he has harvested. Delicious!

9 years old (490 yards)



10 years old (I don't remember how far this one was haha)


12 years old (525 yards)


13 years old (497 yards)


14 years old (821 yards)

We have been very blessed.

Hugnot said:

Usually the nice Thanksgiving meal turned into a verbal political brawl & I loved it! My immigrant French relatives would have made DJT proud!

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That's because of Europeans are more in-tuned with the world than censored USA, I was station in Germany for years and hear things from them no one in states even hinted at. Latest I heard was that 2 of the long range missiles Biden sent to Ukraine is missing and packaged and shipped to china for reverse engineering, my bet it was all about money to turn a blind eye on this.

for me, real Christmas food is roast pork, browned potatoes, brown gravy, red cabbage and rice pudding for desert.......I'm only from a small country called Denmark....... on Christmas Day it's Reed Dear, roasted on bonfire

For many of my former Thanksgivings, I would head out coyote hunting well before sun up. That was when you could still make a few bucks on a pelt. There was a stretch of about ten years where my wife would haul me out to some location, drop me off and I would hunt my way back to town. The hike was usually about eight to ten miles. It was a very productive way to hunt coyotes. After the hunt, I would retrace my route with my four wheeler, and retrieve any coyotes that didn't survive Thanksgiving. After the hunt, my wife would have prepared a fantastic meal and I would give thanks for the day. It was all good.

Our Thanksgiving traditions include the usual suspects, Turkey, stuffing, gravy......more gravy with giblets, mashed taters, yams with marshmallows, cranberry sauce, (from the can), then homemade Pumpkin & or Cherry pie, then a nap & hopefully not miss the football game(s).
However this Thanksgiving is bittersweet this year for our family as we lost my mother in law last year, only 2 days after Thanksgiving.
She was 90 & had a full life raising 3 beautiful daughters, but that doesn't diminish the pain of her last years & her absence now.
Thank goodness we still have Father in law around though.

I hope that everyone uses this time to be together to strengthen the family bonds we have , while we still can.
Life can & will turn on a dime at some point & when it does, we need all the support we can get.

MW204 said:

God has blessed me with the sacrifice of his son Jesus Christ and I celebrate that everyday, but on this special day I get to share that with family and friends and have for all of my 60+ years.
Long live the King until I see you in Glory!

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AMEN BROTHER, hope to see you in Glory as well!!!

We do the family thing with good food and relatives. Hook em horns!