5 Other Holiday Foods That Should Be Added To Thanksgiving Dinner

We all know and understand the deal with Thanksgiving. It is a time to eat so much food that you end up stumbling from the dinner table to the nearest couch like a 1940s alcoholic stinking of gin and schnapps. It is a time of extreme gluttony. A day where people even abstain from food just in order to fully clear vacancy in their poor, unprepared stomach for the deluge of calories that are about to forced down their gullet like a goose receiving gavage in the pursuit of foie gras production.

It is a little strange to me, then, that despite the entire intent of the feast to approach roman vomitorium levels of excess, there are weirdly stringent traditions and rules on WHAT food there is to be eaten. It’s like a strange form of desperate bargaining that says it’s perfectly fine to eat a half-pound of artificially sweetened canned jelly, but god forbid it be made of anything but cranberries, as the traditions decree.

I say, we live in a modern, diverse world, and it’s time to open the gates on what foods are acceptable in a thanksgiving feast. The same way we pick and choose and combine cultures, let us harvest the tastiest bits of other holidays in a process that itself, ties in to the feverish, wendigo-like need to consume that thanksgiving dinner is built around.

Here are 5 recommendations for foods that should be cannibalized from other holidays and brought into our annual belt-loosening.

5 Hamburgers

Thanksgiving is already based heavily around the idea of the original American bounty. It’s often linked to an ancient feast that was shared between pilgrims and native Americans that we now know was probably just a trap designed to give them some sort of unknown disease. But that is for another article! Today, though, many of these foods are very much not a part of a traditional American diet. Turkey is basically only eaten as a thoroughly mediocre office lunch, and nobody is taking down various types of squash by the pound.

So let us bring in a true American stalwart, taken from a celebration of America’s history that is based around our favorite pastimes of alcoholism and violence, July 4th. The humble hamburger. Not only, most importantly, are hamburgers delicious, but they are a perfect gluttony food. There’s something about eating more than 2 hamburgers that just serves as a salve for the soul. A hamburger is the perfect size to always be able to eat just one more.

4 Birthday Cake

Next, let’s look to dessert. This is an area, that, to be honest, I think Thanksgiving really feels lacking in, because of some strange hard and fast rules about what an acceptable dessert is. I do not know when or why pies climbed to the top of the mountain and kicked every other dessert deep into the void, but it’s time to end their hollow reign. Sure, I like a pumpkin or a pecan pie, but why do they get full power over the domain?

Meanwhile, cake is just… better. It is almost impossible to go wrong with. Like pizza, pretty much even the worst cake is still pretty good. Pies, on the other hand, are not only much more finicky, but frequently absolutely butchered by a first-time baker or a young family member. A bad pie is a truly torturous slog through undercooked batter and what is basically gross fruit soup. Plus, if anyone really wants to push back, every holiday is basically the birthday of that holiday, right?

3 Eggnog

Perhaps the only area in which Thanksgiving doesn’t go wholly over the top is in the beverage department. Sure, you might have a glass of wine or an IPA too many, but that pales in comparison to the caloric damage you’re doing with the rest of the feast. That’s where a challenger approaches: delicious, fat-filled eggnog. It’s not like eggnog season is even that far away, so I think we should fully be able to bump it up a week or two.

After all, eggnog is basically the gravy of drinks. It sort of tastes like a food smoothie already, and it gums up your works in a way that absolutely hits the gland that tells you you’re doing something bad to your body. A full pint of eggnog feels like you just drank a full roll of christmas cookie dough. It’s a drink that needs more love. Thanksgiving can provide that.

2 Reese’s That Look Like Pumpkins

Again, more modifications to the lacking dessert variety. And again, we’re not exactly moving mountains here, calendar-wise. Not to mention, most people probably still have at least the dregs of halloween candy in a closet somewhere, and if not, a trip to your local CVS will refill the coffers at desperate sales prices. It even sort of thematically fits. You’ve probably got a bunch of pumpkins sitting in the center of the table for decoration, why not throw a couple delicious chocolate and peanut butter versions in among the patch.

Not to mention that the pumpkin-shaped Reese’s, specifically, are the Thanksgiving of candy. Regular Reese’s are designed to be a perfect ratio of chocolate to peanut butter to make a neat little candy item. Pumpkin Reese’s throw all that out of the window, basically being the packaged version of eating peanut butter out of the jar over the sink and chasing it with chocolate chips.

1 Peeps

Look, first of all, anyone from the Peeps business reading this is already drooling, dollar signs in their eyes at the prospect of being able to sell their devilish little birds more than once a year. Is it really fair to take the extrusion molds used for Peeps and chain them away like a candy-making werewolf for 11 months of the year?

We even have a way to ease Peeps into the thanksgiving dinner: on top of sweet potatoes. It’s already popular and widely accepted to top sweet potatoes with marshmallows, though controversial. What’s a few extra grains of neon sugar going to do? Sure, it might look a little bit like a Neopets village that got hit with napalm, but that’s ok. Plus, it kind of fits thematically with a big part of Thanksgiving: widespread bird murder.

Top Image: Pixabay/Pixabay