Pointlife
Thanksgiving turkey traditions
The Pointer
skrez305@uwsp.edu
Whether you call it Thanksgiving, Turkey Day, or something else, it’s something celebrated. Many people celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving different ways.
Katie Gruening, a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, celebrates the day at home with her family. There are eight of them total gathering together but it’s tradition that only her mother cooks.
“We watch my mom cook ... she doesn’t let us help,” Gruening said.
Another family tradition of theirs is watching a cartoon movie afterwards and taking a nap.
The nap seems to be a tradition in many families, especially due to the tryptophan in the turkey. Tryptophan is an amino acid that helps the body chemicals act as a calming agent, leading to sleep.
However, napping and family dinners are not all the ways that UW-SP students celebrate turkey day.
Eric Voight, a junior, has not been home for Thanksgiving in nine years. Instead he travels to Iron County with some of the men folk of his extended family and hunts deer.
Voight and his crew still have what would be considered a traditional Thanksgiving sit-down meal. Every man pitches in to help with the cooking.
Their family traditions include story telling and different rights of passage within hunting. The rights of passages include getting the first deer and finding and following tracks to find the deer.
In Voight’s group they shoot for the trophy first and the meat second, though they let none of that go to waste.
For both Gruening and Voight, the holiday and their family traditions are still very important to them. Possibly, more important since they’ve been away at college.
“It’s one week a year I know I get to spend time with my dad,” Voight said.
Gruening had similar feelings along the same lines.
“I love it [Thanksgiving]; I look forward to it,” said Gruening.
