“I get by with a little help from my friends.” This has definitely been my theme song this year. I don’t know about you, but for my husband and I, our friends become our family, or “framily.” It’s taken more effort to keep up with them all once our little girl came along but opportunities like Friendsgiving are a perfect way to get everyone together for great food, good wine and some nice hearty belly laughs. Here’s some of the activities that made our first Friendsgiving a success.

Share the Recipes

Friendsgiving means it’s an opportunity to combine traditions and for Thanksgiving, that means FOOD. I told our gang that I would handle the turkey but I wanted them to start the menu by volunteering their favorite family recipes. That means we got “Mom Mom’s Sweet Potato Fluff” and “Mom’s Pumpkin Soup” – YES PLEASE! Once the dishes were submitted, I filled in the holes with some of my favorites and ones I’d been wanting to try. Here’s where we ended up

That’s Brussesls Sprouts Stuffing and Green Bean Casserole at the bottom – incase you couldn’t guess and needed to drool more. And desserts included Peanut Butter Bars, Pumpkin Cookies, Pumpkin Crunch Cake and Pumpkin Chocolate Cheesecake (don’t miss these recipes on my Pinterest!). After I saw the menu come together I HAD to see the recipes and then I figured since we’re sharing dishes with each other, why not share all the recipes with everyone? So I whipped up some recipe cards and put them together in cute little packs for everyone to take home.

—–MAKE SURE TO DOWNLOAD THE RECIPE CARD TEMPLATES AT BOTTOM!—–

Sample wines

We love wine and so do our friends so we asked them each to bring two bottles of the same wine and have them in a paper bag so no one could see what they were. We then did a wine tasting game BEFORE dinner so people could choose which wine they wanted to pair with their dinner.

Some of our friends had the awesome game, All You Need is Wine, which we used but if you don’t want to spend the money, you can easily use whatever paper bag you have to keep the bottles hidden and guess the grape (Pinot, Cab, etc) and wine scale rating (download my cheat sheet cards at the bottom!).

We also have one friend that is pregnant at the moment but having been in her shoes before, we didn’t want her to miss out so she got to taste different sparkling juices and coconut water 🙂

FRIENDLY SEATING ARRANGEMENT

I don’t always do place cards but when you want to mix things up and get people out of their box, DO THEM. Since it was Friendsgiving, I decided to not have couples sit together (there was no complaining :). These little pumpkins were cute enough that everyone wanted to take them home too to brighten up their desks and homes.

Spur the thankful convo

Usually at Friendsgivings most people know each other and the convo flows freely, however, given that this has a Thanksgiving theme, I wanted to incorporate a way to spur thankful conversation without it being the typical, “what are you thankful for?” There are thankfully a lot of Thanksgiving-esque conversation ideas on Pinterest so I stole some and created some of my own. and found a tasteful way to sprinkle them into the tablescape.

I have NO IDEA how this one ended up at my husbands spot with me sitting across from him 😉

At the end of the day, all that matters are the people – so get to thanking your friends for all they do for you and get them together for your own Friendsgiving!

Free Downloads

–Thanksgiving Recipe Cards–

–Wine Rating Cards–

–Thankful Conversation Starter Cards–

-Recipe Board: antique shop / Burlap & Lace Ribbon, Goodie Bags: Michaels / Wine Bags: All You Need is Wine–