Friendsgiving is like having a Thanksgiving dinner with all of your closest friends and spreading thanks for all the happiness they bring to your life.

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Katie Roach

This is a step to making the turkey napkin ring.

Dinner

Friendsgiving is really what you want it to be. There are so many dishes to make for Thanksgiving dinner, but the traditional foods don’t have to be staples.

I decided to go traditional, cooking all the traditional foods myself. This was the first time I ever cooked a turkey… and it was a lot harder and time-consuming than I had bargained for. I went online to find a quick and easy turkey recipe from the Food Network.

Making a turkey is no easy task, and I found that out the hard way. For our group of 10 people we got a 15-pound turkey which was oddly heavy and awkward to move. Thank goodness my mom knows how to make a turkey, because I definitely did not.

Our first problem was that turkey skin is creepy. I didn’t want to touch it. The first go around I also did not leave it in the oven for long enough, and it was still cold when we put the thermometer in. After the second time of baking the turkey, we got it right. I didn’t even attempt to cut the turkey. My mom stepped in to carve. I will not try to make a turkey ever again.

The flavor was a little bit dry, but my friends “gobbled” it up!

I made my all time favorite, green bean casserole. Every year for Thanksgiving my grandma makes the best green bean casserole. Her top secret recipe is from none other than… Campbell’s kitchen!

Thanksgiving dinner can’t be Thanksgiving dinner without lots of stuffing. So many different kinds of stuffing to make, which one will you choose? Just to help you out, I chose one of the easiest and tastiest stuffing recipes to wow friends and family with.

DIY’s

One Friendsgiving necessity is pictures, because who will know it happened if you don’t have any pictures? If you’re going to take pictures, you need the perfect spot and decorations. One Pinterest idea has an easy to decorate picture spot along with a holdable frame.

For the picture spot, all you’re going to need are fall colored streamers, any colored cardstock, yarn, tape, scissors, and a marker that will stand out on the cardstock. Colors used in the picture are orange, red, and beige.

1. First cut off pieces of the streamers in 6.5 – 7 foot strips and tape them up onto the wall.
2. Next cut the yarn into two, 7 foot strands.
3. Take the cardstock and cut out diamond shapes of any size.
4. Fold the diamond shape over the string so it makes two equally sized triangles. Fold four pieces of cardstock over one string and six over the other.
5. Write out letter by letter G – I – V- E on the first string, and T – H – A – N – K- S on the second.
6. Hang the first string across the streams on the wall, hang the second string under it.

Now, you have great picture spot that only took 15 minutes to make.

For the next DIY in this pair, there are two easy steps. For the holdable picture frame you’ll need a poster board as big as you want, a hot glue gun, scissors, any colored paint (I used black), and fake decorative flowers.

1. Cut out a square in the middle (big enough to fit your head inside). Make sure that the cardboard border is roughly 3-6 inches wide.
2. Paint the border with the color that you choose.
3. Take your flowers, and hot glue gun and carefully make a dot of glue in the flowers and immediately place them on the cardboard wherever you want them.

This can be used to hold in front of you and a friend like a festive picture frame.

All Thanksgiving celebrations have a good table decoration, so what would be cuter than a festive napkin ring for your Friendsgiving celebration! All that you are going to need for this is fake flowers from any craft store (I used red, orange, yellow, and white), hot glue, scissors, black felt, brown felt, and googly eyes.

1. First take the colored flowers and rip them apart by layers for all of the colors.
2. Next cut them all in half, so it looks like a semi flower.
3. Now take the black felt and cut it out so it is shaped like 2 circles on top of each other. Making sure the top circle is smaller. Also make sure that this is smaller than the flowers, or the same size
4. Hot glue the flowers in any order, one on top of the other.
5. Take the black felt, this is the turkey, glue it on top of the flowers making them look like the turkeys feathers.
6. Now take the brown felt and cut out small triangles to be the beak
7. Take the beak, and 2 googly eyes and hot glue them to the top circle part of the turkey.
8. Lastly cut out a small circle of black felt, glue it to the back of the turkey, and glue one of the clothes pins onto the back

Now you have cute and festive table toppers to keep the napkins clipped together!

Friendsgiving is about having fun with your friends and being thankful for all they do or have done for you. Enjoy trying these crafts and post pictures of you making them and tag The Lance @lhsjournalism on Instagram and Twitter.

Thanksgiving set up, and dinner is a lot of work. I learned that I owe my mom thanks for all of her efforts. Making Thanksgiving dinner takes hours in the kitchen. After though, I had a sense of pride to see that my friends were very impressed by my efforts, and loved the food!