Thanksgiving 2015: Country Stars Share Thanksgiving Traditions and Memories

Thanksgiving is a time for family, friends, food and traditions! As we gear up for Thanksgiving 2015, a number of country stars are opening up about their favorite Thanksgiving memories and traditions.

For Cole Swindell, Mickey Guyton, Eric Paslay, and Aaron Parker, Thanksgiving is all about gathering with their families.

“My favorite memories of Thanksgiving are just getting together with the family each year,” Swindell told Sounds Like Nashville. “Being gone so much on the road, it’s nice to just see everybody and catch up. AND, I try to fit as much food from the kitchen on my plate as possible. It’s got to last me a year!”

“Every year my family has Thanksgiving at my Grandma’s house in Moody, Texas. One particular year my dad and uncle wanted to treat us to a late night movie,” Guyton shared with SLN. “So all of my cousins piled up in my dads truck and went to go see Space Jam with Michael Jordan.”

“My best Thanksgiving memory, I think, is just hanging out with family, watching football and eating too much,” Paslay expressed to us. “My favorite Thanksgiving food, I think, is the tryptophan turkey, ‘cause it really puts me to sleep. No [yawn], it really does.”

“I have many memories from thanksgiving and they all include having all the family over, eating mass amounts of pumpkin pie, playing corn hole, watching football, and chopping wood with my brothers for fires in the backyard. It’s a special time of year for us,” Parker told us.

Kip Moore, Little Big Town’s Kimberly Schlapman and A Thousand Horses’ Zach Brown also love spending the holidays with their families.

“Thanksgiving—we love Thanksgiving, ‘cause we get to be with our families and we don’t often get to spend time with our families, our extended families, until the holidays,” Schlapman shared. “I love being around the table with my family and talking and laughing and cooking and eating…”

“I [usually] go home for Thanksgiving,” Moore expressed. “I love going home to see all them. I have five brothers and sisters and it’s a blast to go home and just catch up on their lives. I get so wrapped up in all this that I lose touch sometimes, and it’s cool to hear everything going on with them.

“We’re really looking forward to Thanksgiving this year,” Brown said. “It’s gonna be our first Thanksgiving actually that we’ll be home for in a couple of years,” he said. “So I’m excited to go down to Georgia and see my family.”

TJ and John Osborne of Brothers Osborne have a unique (and special!) Thanksgiving tradition. “What we’ve done the past several years is because it’s so hard to go home, we would have what we call the Misfit Thanksgiving dinner, and all the people in Nashville who aren’t able to go home to their families, we would just invite them over to our house and have a big potluck style Thanksgiving dinner. We’ll take like a couple of tables and throw them together and throw some sheets on it just to make it look nice. It’s a very redneck display of like tableware, because all the plates don’t match and the forks and knives don’t match, but we don’t care. People will bring wine, and at the end of the day, we’ll probably have 12-15 people all sitting at dinner together that weren’t able to go home with their families, and just enjoy it with friends. It’s been really fun. Definitely a lot less stress than going home.”

Natalie Stovall of Natalie Stovall and The Drive told us that she has been assigned a very important role on Thanksgiving… recreating her grandma’s famous rolls!

“One of my favorite Thanksgiving memories is making my Granny’s famous rolls. Her rolls have always been a family favorite, but a few years ago, she wasn’t up to making them, so I thought I’d give them a try,” she said. “It has now officially become my job each year, and I still use a copy of the recipe that she cut out from the newspaper in the 1930’s. It’s a long process that takes patience as the dough has to rise overnight. It makes me feel like the “holidays have begun” when I hit play on my Christmas playlist and start making rolls for all to enjoy!”

For others, like Canaan Smith, Lady Antebellum’s Charles Kelley, Tim McGraw and Hank Williams, Jr., the traditions all circle around the food.

“Pumpkin pie is where it’s at. My mom makes the best,” Smith shared with us. “She got it from her mom, my Nanny. It’s so good. It’s made from scratch. Everything about it, it’s just mouthwatering. I love it. I can’t get enough. If I could get fat, it’d be from pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.”

“One of my most memorable Thanksgiving memories was probably the first year that me and my two brothers decided to start our annual eating contest where we ate throughout the whole day,” Kelley reflected. “We started that morning and weighed ourselves and at the very end of the night, we weighed ourselves out and all three of us equally gained five pounds. I wish we had a more accurate scale to decide the winner, but we all tied. Five pounds!”

McGraw loves the food, but leaves the cooking to his wife, Faith Hill. “For Thanksgiving, I don’t cook. Faith does all the cooking for Thanksgiving. We have to have turkey, we have to have our stuffing, and we have to have cornbread and peas, of course.”

“I do cook and it’s probably gonna be a deep fried, wild turkey or elk roast…Bocephus style,” Williams joked.