Every year, as the end of November approaches, I resort to scrolling through social media to procrastinate working on rapidly approaching deadlines. My feed is filled with fellow students eagerly counting down the days until their holiday break and people attempting to skip ahead to December by putting up their Christmas trees and playing holiday classics.
Occasionally, a rare video about Thanksgiving will manage to fight its way through the already overwhelming amount of Christmas videos to appear on my feed. However, in the past few years, in the midst of my scrolling, I’ve noticed an increasing trend among these Thanksgiving videos of people making fun of “turkey-trot families.”
For anyone unfamiliar, the turkey trot is an American Thanksgiving tradition where individuals, or more often entire families, sign up to run Thanksgiving themed 5K races, usually on the morning of the holiday. Most people who complain about turkey-trot families make fun of the race’s admittedly embarrassing name, or can’t believe that so many people would voluntarily wake up early on a holiday to go out into the chilly November weather and force themselves to run over 3 miles when instead they could be lying in their warm beds and prepping to stuff themselves at Thanksgiving dinner later that day.
Unsurprisingly based on the entire premise of this article, I have to tell you: I come from one of these turkey trot families. As long as I can remember we have woken up on Thanksgiving morning to get in the car to drive downtown and jog the 5K with all the other turkey-trot families.
Despite being a turkey-trot defender, I can admit it is a very easy tradition to mock. I’ll readily tell you that I’ve laughed at almost every tiktok I’ve seen of people hoping they never marry into a turkey trot family (I especially laughed at a video of a girl lamenting that her boyfriend wanted to convert to being a turkey trot family).
I know running is far from many people’s favorite activity. By defending the turkey trot I am definitely not trying to suggest that everybody should be doing a 5K every Thanksgiving, I can totally understand why people wouldn’t want to start their holiday morning bright and early to go join a crowd with a bunch of other families about to force themselves to exercise rather than sleep in. My defense of turkey trots isn’t trying to convert turkey trot haters into fans, instead I want my defense of turkey trots to encourage people to fully embrace their respective holiday traditions, whatever they are, no matter if they’re easily mockable or not.
I could defend turkey trots by trying to argue that running is healthy for you. I also know that I’m spoiled by being from Washington DC, where the route of the turkey trot goes by the National Mall and the Capitol building. I could defend turkey trots by bringing up the fact that many of them (including DC’s) are hosted to raise money for charitable organizations. But ultimately for me, all of those defenses are just happy bonuses.
The main reason I don’t mind being part of a turkey trot family has far more to do with the comfort that comes with intentionally repeating the same traditions every year with people I love.
Last year was my first year at university, and it was also my first Thanksgiving spent away from my family and my home. While I was happy to get to celebrate the day with fellow Americans I had befriended here in St Andrews, I also couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by how much I missed my family and how homesick I felt.
After a lot of dejected reflection on what I would be missing out on at home, I made the decision that I was going to run 5K on my own, here in St Andrews, in an attempt to fight off some of the FOMO and homesickness.
I can’t say the experience was anything like my normal experiences of running the turkey trot back home; it was very dark by the time I finally was able to run at 5pm, it may have it started raining on me in the middle of the run, and I was jogging alone rather than surrounded by other runners, but the act of even trying to connect with my family through this tradition helped with my feelings that I was missing out on my family’s Thanksgiving back home.
Whether it’s playing a specific game, watching a specific movie, or making a certain food, whether you’re in the midst of a big family holiday or whether you’re far away and missing your loved ones, I’d encourage everyone to engage with their own holiday traditions as much as they can. Even if the traditions can’t be recreated in exactly the same way, I believe that even making an effort to engage with them can bring connection and comfort during these colder and darker months.
So while I look forward to laughing at the anti-turkey trot family videos sure to appear on my social media in the upcoming weeks, I’ll still get up and run my annual 5K this Thanksgiving morning, and hopefully find some familiar happiness in connecting with this tradition.