10 Moments When Thanksgiving Crafts Bring Together Crocheted Costumes, Handmade Table Settings, and First Winter Knitting Projects

I crocheted turkey costumes for my stepdaughter for Thanksgiving, but she looked at them and said, “Throw these ugly things away. Mum would never let me wear such cheap clothes.” Honestly, that hurt more than I expected.
I still hosted Thanksgiving dinner, and then my husband’s ex, Maria, showed up. A little later, I heard voices coming from my bedroom, so I went to check. I opened the door and stopped. Maria and my stepdaughter were sitting on the floor, cutting out family pictures for a Thanksgiving memory board, both wearing the turkey costumes I’d made.
Maria looked up and smiled. “She wanted to surprise you, but she was too embarrassed to tell you she actually liked them.” My stepdaughter came over, hugged me, and whispered, “I’m sorry. I thought Mum would laugh at me, but she said handmade things mean someone really cares.”
Then Maria showed me the board, filled with pictures of my stepdaughter, her dad, and me. She’d even saved a spot for a new photo of all of us. I honestly didn’t expect that kindness from her, but that Thanksgiving, we took the picture together, and my stepdaughter refused to take off her turkey costume for the rest of the night.

At a thrift store last September, I found a bag with half a sweater still on the needles, the pattern, and four skeins of the same dye lot. A note on the pattern said “For Danny, Thanksgiving ‘19,” and the margins were full of the original knitter’s notes, including “Danny has long arms, add 2 in.”
I decided to finish it. The knitter’s tension was tighter than mine, so I went down half a needle size to match her gauge, and it took about six weeks. There was also a receipt in the bag from a local yarn shop with a loyalty number on it.
The owner looked the number up and realized it belonged to a longtime customer who had passed away, whose daughter still shops there. She called the daughter for me instead of giving me their details.
The family had only recently cleared out the house to sell it and hadn’t known the sweater was in there. I dropped it off the week before Thanksgiving. Danny was already an adult in 2019, and his mom had knit it roomy, so it fit when he tried it on at the door, and she was right about the two inches.

I’ve owned a small yarn shop for eleven years, so here’s one from behind the counter. Last October, a young mom came in to buy yarn for her first knitting project, a blanket for her baby’s first Thanksgiving.
I steered her toward superwash wool, since anything for a baby has to survive a lot of washing, but it isn’t cheap. Her card was declined, and before I could suggest putting it on hold for her, she started putting skeins back.
One of my regulars, a retired man who buys sock yarn every month, told me to put it on his card and add a beginner pattern book. She tried to say no, and he told her his late wife had taught him to knit and that he owed it to somebody. He left before she could get his name.
She finished the blanket the night before Thanksgiving and brought it in afterward to show me, with uneven edges but very respectable for a first try. I passed her thank-you card along, and he kept it.

This thread is making me think about our first Thanksgiving after we moved from Eastern Europe three years ago. We didn’t understand the holiday, and we had no idea what you were supposed to bring as a guest.
Our neighbor, a retired nurse, invited us anyway, and my mother couldn’t stop looking at her crocheted placemats and the knitted leaves scattered around the centerpiece. My mother knitted constantly back home, but we left with two suitcases, and her needles weren’t a priority.
A week later, our neighbor came over with a bag of yarn and two pairs of needles. They usually knitted together on weekday afternoons while I was at work, so they communicated by pointing and using a translation app.
They knit completely differently: my mother uses a combined style with the yarn in her left hand, and our neighbor throws English style. My mother still thinks her way is faster. She’s learning to crochet now so she can make matching placemats for our neighbor before this Thanksgiving.

I teach fourth grade, and every fall my class makes a table runner for our Thanksgiving feast, with each kid crocheting one square. We use K hooks and worsted yarn held double, and two parent volunteers come in twice a week to help with the hobby, because I can’t untangle 25 kids’ yarn at once.
Last year one of my students, I’ll call him M., wouldn’t touch his yarn for days. He wasn’t being difficult; he was scared of getting it wrong in front of the other kids. A girl in his group started sitting next to him and crocheting very slowly so he could watch her hands. I didn’t step in, because it was working better than anything I’d tried.
By the end of the week he had a finished square, tight on one side but solid. After the feast, the runner went home with a different student each weekend through December. M.’s mom emailed me a photo of it on their table, with his square turned so it faced his seat.