At Stone Bridge High School students are coming up with different ways to celebrate Thanksgiving this year.

Most families celebrate with a large meal and sometimes a religious service. The most common meals during Thanksgiving includes: turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pies, but not everyone celebrates this way.

“My family is Pakistani and we celebrate with our own traditional foods called biryani, korma, and naan,” senior Hamza Khan said.

Other students also reveal their family traditions for Thanksgiving.

“Our family is Chinese and as a tradition we like to have hot pots which is a spicy soup and people would throw in vegetables, seafood, and beans. We also as a family like to make our own sauces,” senior Cynthia Liang said.

Thanksgiving is a worldwide holiday and many more students share their traditions for Thanksgiving.

“My family is Philippines. We celebrate Thanksgiving occasionally. We have lechon which is fried pork, and my mom and I made this dessert called Brazo de Mercedes, which is a meringue and custard cake,” junior Rosanna Fajutrao said

But many students still celebrate with meals known as traditional.

“Traditionally my family has ham with gravy instead of turkey, and we also have cranberry sauce and mac n cheese,” senior Dominic Fornatora

The reason many families in the United States celebrate Thanksgiving is to spend more time with each other and to express their traditional beliefs.

Giving thanks helps us recognize, appreciate, and be grateful for the good things in life.

“This isn’t the most important holiday to me, but I think that it’s a time to be thankful for this world and that we should share that thanks with our family and loved ones, and I believe the world needs more of that,” Khan said

Fajutrao agrees that the meal is not the most important part of the holiday.

“During Thanksgiving, we tend to take things for granted and I believe that this is a holiday widely spread where we can all come together and unite,” Fajutrao said.

Stone Bridge is full of students that have their own family traditions for Thanksgiving, and to learn more about the history of Thanksgiving visit this website.