How to Plan Ahead for Thanksgiving

Series Summary

Family gatherings are a tradition in most American households for Thanksgiving dinner. Observed on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States, Thanksgiving celebrates giving thanks for bountiful harvests, as well as celebrating family and friends. It is generally a very traditional family event. Sometimes called Turkey Day, Thanksgiving dinner almost always features turkey, but also stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.

Thanksgiving is a great day to gather friends and family in celebrations, but what happens when the celebrations turns into a stressful nightmare. Our expert is here to rescue you from the annual Thanksgiving dinner disasters. In this free video series, our expert will offer up tips and advice on how to keep your Thanksgiving dinner fun and stress free. Learn how to plan ahead for traveling relatives, snacks and games. Get tips on how to remain calm on Thanksgiving and when the best time to eat dinner should be. If you have a holiday event, let our expert show you how to maintain your cool for these stressful times.

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to show you today how to survive a big family Thanksgiving. Step number one to surviving a big family Thanksgiving is to make sure that you plan ahead. Most stress from Thanksgiving or any other holiday or observance for that matter comes from surprises. Things you didn't anticipate, they're basically rushing in your direction and then mash up all in that day and everything gets crazy, flustered, you get angry, people tempers grows short. So the big thing about that is avoiding this and how can you avoid stress planned. A lot of steps we are going to be covering today are going to have planning as their core function. But just in general give yourself time to think through the holidays, what am I going to have to do, who's coming things like that. We are going to cover it, in more detail later plan ahead that is the biggest verb, one verb to avoid stress, plan. If you basically plan ahead then you can later cut off and prevent mash ups before they actually occur and everyone goes stress ball crazy. So in addition I would just say start thinking about Thanksgiving, probably not too far after Halloween, I know I don't like the holiday creep anymore than the rest of the people do. But ya, give yourself early November time to start thinking about what's going to go on for Thanksgiving and how basically you're going to survive the big family Thanksgiving with minimal stress."