By MEAGAN BRUNSON
‘Tis the season for turkey and traditions.
There isn’t much that sounds more appealing to a starving BYU student than mom’s homemade stuffing or grandma’s apple pie.
As BYU students get ready for the Thanksgiving holiday, some will fly home to visit their families and others will spend the day with friends or relatives in the area. Regardless of location, everyone who celebrates will have some kind of Thanksgiving dinner involving food and tradition.
BYU students and faculty take part in a variety of Thanksgiving traditions each year.
Many traditional Thanksgivings involve a large family dinner and an afternoon of football and family time. J. Kelly Flannigan, BYU associate professor of computer science, said he started a different Thanksgiving dinner tradition with his family last year.
Flannigan said he will take his family to camp in Zion’s National Park in Moab, Grand County, for Thanksgiving. After a meal complete with turkey and pie cooked in a dutch oven, the children ride bikes and the whole family will enjoy a Thanksgiving outdoors, he said.
“We cook all the regular fixin’s. We just cook them outside,” Flannigan said. “This is only our second year to do it, but we plan on doing it forever.”
Some families in Provo for Thanksgiving decide to skip cooking all together and just go out. Melanie Jarman, hostess and cashier in the Provo Marriott Hotel’s restaurant, said the Marriott hosts a huge Thanksgiving dinner every year.
The amount of people wanting to eat at the Marriott for Thanksgiving has increased over the last couple of years, she said. People make reservations for this out-of-the-house Thanksgiving dinner a couple of months in advance.
“We get way more reservations each year,” Jarman said. “In fact, we were full and stopped taking reservations about a week and a half ago.”
Jarman said people eating out on Thanksgiving seem to either be families in town to visit college students, older couples or single parents with children. The trend is that none of them want to cook.
Though many people are starting to do different things for Thanksgiving, some BYU students said their families will stick to tradition.
“We have a huge family dinner, then go play football — or watch it,” said Rick Madsen, 24, a junior from Fresno, Calif., majoring in community health. “We all have two candy corns and we go around the table and tell two things we’re thankful for before we eat though.”
Brett Andrus, 22, a junior from Dallas, majoring in business, said he’ll go home this year for the holiday to help his family get in the spirit of giving.
“We make tons of food and get a bunch of turkeys and take them to families in our area who don’t have enough for Thanksgiving,” Andrus said.
Jana Parker, 21, a junior from Fresno, Calif., majoring in health science, said her family always goes to see movies on Thanksgiving. Brandon Robins, 22, a junior from Rock Springs, Wyo,. majoring in mechanical engineering, said he hasn’t had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner since before his mission and he is looking forward to it this year.
Lisa Hawkins, managing editor of BYU’s School of Family Life Publications, said she spends the whole day before Thanksgiving just making pies. She said most families getting away from the traditional Thanksgiving dinner seem to be in homes where the mother works and doesn’t have two days to take off to make a feast.
Hawkins said she and her husband, like many young married couples, sat down and discussed which traditions from both sides of the family to keep and which to throw out for their own family.
“Neither of our families were big on sweet potatoes, so that worked out,” Hawkins said.
Hawkins said people are ready to die before they abandon Christmas traditions, but Thanksgiving traditions seem to be more common across the nation and adjustable in marriages.
In the BYU School of Family Life’s first edition of “Marriage & Families,” Lloyd Newell, BYU associate professor of Church history and doctrine, said traditions give people a sense of family and belonging in his article titled “Traditions: A Foundation for Strong Families.”
“Traditions are the cement that keeps the family together … and help you withstand the storms that come,” Newell said in his article.
Traditions allow families to examine themselves and their customs and can help connect generations, he said.
Randal Day, BYU professor of marriage, family and human development, said he recently focused a lesson in one of his classes on the importance of traditions.
“I think family traditions are an essential feature of family life,” Day said. “If you want to destroy a family, one of the first things you would do would be to trivialize traditions.”
Day said good traditions can help a family achieve goals like family unity and positive values. As they are deciding what traditions will be, families should carefully consider actions that will help facilitate desired goals.
“Traditions like Thanksgiving have been trivialized to the Macy’s parade on TV and chips and dips and a game,” Day said. He said he hopes BYU students uphold substantial traditions as they start their own families.
