Adapt the holidays to make them work for you.

I’m a big believer in adapting holidays and the traditions we associate with them to better represent you and your family. Otherwise we end up putting so much pressure on ourselves to do all these things we don’t want to do or even care about, you know?! For my family, that means when it comes to Thanksgiving, we’ve discarded a lot of aspects of the holiday that we don’t want to celebrate, and we kept 2 parts that we most definitely do want to celebrate: food and gratitude.

And I’m a vegetarian and my kids are (like many kids) absurdly picky eaters.

So we’ve adapted the traditional Thanksgiving meal to better suit us: each member of our family picks a food they’re really grateful for, and we serve those chosen foods for the meal, regardless of how bizarre the combination may be. Last year’s Thanksgiving dinner menu was ramen noodles from Otaku Ramen (Wells’s pick), nachos (my pick), hot chicken (my husband’s pick), zucchini muffins from Dose (Mary Coco’s pick), and a Carvel ice cream cake (Beck’s pick). Our kids were pumped that they don’t even have to wait until after dinner to have the ice cream cake; everything is served together as a main course.

I set the table with nice linens and my grandmother’s fancy china, and the dress code is wear what you wish, so I might be in a fun outfit, one kid might be in pajamas, and another kid will be shirtless. It’s all a big hit.

Before we started that tradition, one year we did “piesgiving” and the entire Thanksgiving meal was just an assortment of pies, including savory pies and quiches as well as the more obvious sweet pies.

At the core of MKW Design is my belief in discarding outdated rules or expectations that don’t suit you to instead make something that truly reflects you, so here’s hoping we can all find ways to adapt the upcoming holidays to better suit us!