This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.
When my kids were little, I did what a lot of parents do on Thanksgiving: I tried to get them to eat some traditional foods, and failed miserably. They would sometimes eat a roll (if it was the correct kind), and maybe a bite of turkey, but usually not mashed potatoes or stuffing—the horror!
A few years ago, after returning home from a Thanksgiving gathering where my kids had, once again, eaten very little, I searched online for “Thanksgiving dishes kids actually eat” and stumbled on the idea of taking inspiration from Peanuts. In A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, from 1973, Peppermint Patty invites herself and a couple of friends to Charlie Brown’s house for the holiday, and Charlie reluctantly hosts a last-minute Friendsgiving. To produce the meal, Snoopy dons a chef hat and orchestrates cooking a snack dinner consisting of buttered toast, popcorn, pretzels, and jellybeans. Is it a healthy and balanced meal? No. But will kids actually eat it? Yes.
That evening, I served my kids the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving dinner while they watched the TV special (they were, after all, still hungry after not eating much earlier in the day). It used ingredients I already had on hand, only took a few minutes to prepare, and it felt like a nice way to wind down after a hectic day of cooking and socializing.
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I stumbled on this meal idea just as my youngest was starting to come out of his picky-eater stage. By the following year, when my kids were 8 and 11, they would both eat enough of a traditional Thanksgiving meal that they didn’t require a separate one. But for the past few years, I’ve kept up the tradition of serving the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving meal in the evening while they watch the special. Since they aren’t normally allowed to watch TV during dinner or eat just snacks for meals, to them, it feels like a special holiday treat.
If you want to try out the Charlie Brown feast, there are different ways to adapt the meal. Pinterest-leaning parents could decorate the kids’ table with Peanuts-themed decorations, and many different pretzel types could be used. If you are going for accuracy, the special also shows some sort of pink sundae-like dessert in glass bowls on the table while the kids eat their meal. The food-prep scene does not depict the chef (Snoopy) making these desserts, so you could turn them into whatever you want: perhaps ice cream sundaes, or a strawberry nutrition shake that would “make up” for other foods your selective eater has been avoiding.
Asha Dore
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If I had found this idea when my kids were younger, I would have proposed to my extended family that we serve the kids the Charlie Brown meal at the main Turkey Day event while the adults ate the traditional meal. I suspect some people may react to this idea the way Peppermint Patty does in the special—by insisting that the food is not traditional enough. But Peppermint Patty eventually comes around, and with any luck, any skeptics in your family would too. After all, having kids sit down to eat a full plate of snack foods for one meal is probably a better tradition than having them sit down, eat one bite of a roll, and then start asking when they can be excused.
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