What are the traditional dishes in your family's Thanksgiving celebrations?

I was just answering a question about making mac and cheese for Thanksgiving and I realized I had never seen mac and cheese at Thanksgiving, nor could I imagine ever seeing it. It’s not part of our tradition.

We have the usual stuff, but this question isn’t really about Turkey and cranberries and stuffing. Probably not about mashed potatoes, either.

This is about the food traditions that you have that you believe may be unique to your family or to people from your region of the country.

In my family, creamed onions and butternut squash (instead of sweet potatoes or candied yams) are traditional. I don’t like butternut squash, but I still have to serve it at Thanksgiving. I prefer a sweet potato recipe that my Mississippi-born brother-in-law taught me.

We also have mince pie for dessert, made with real homemade mincemeat that has actual chuck around the neck in it. Every few years we have a mincemeat making party. Then we have mincemeat for four years or so.

There also used to be a tradition of making pecan pralines. Northern pralines which aren’t all that much like Southern ones. But these days they are a bit rich, I think, so they don’t go over so well. Besides which, my father doesn’t eat nuts.