How to Make Thanksgiving More Fun for Everyone

Hit them at the door. Anne K. Fishel, a psychology professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of Home for Dinner: Mixing Food, Fun, and Conversation for a Happier Family and Healthier Kids, offers a thoughtful way to greet guests and get the festivities started. It starts with placing a fedora near the entry and beside it, a stack of Post-its and a pen. Ask incoming friends and family to write on one Post-it the name of a character in a children's book they most identify with, and on another, an animal they'd like to be. At dinner, bring the hat to the table, pull out a slip of paper and ask, “Who would like to guess who wrote down Harriet the Spy ... or [who wrote down] a dolphin?”

As Fishel explains: “If people want to, they can expound on why they identified with a particular book or animal, but if they don't want to, we just move on to the next one.” Fishel employed the game for one of her own Thanksgiving gatherings, in an effort to introduce friendly, nonpartisan talk after the 2016 presidential election. As she notes, “it made for some lighthearted conversation that involved anyone, regardless of age or political stripe.” You can also try a variation that involves filling a hat or bowl with strips of paper that express what you're thankful for this year, then taking turns drawing and reading each others’ notes at the table.

Use any available children. If you're lucky enough to have a cooperative not-yet-teen at your disposal, know that they can help with your pregame messaging and logistics, moving people onto the next activity without anyone (such as you) having to sound really pushy.

Last Christmas, for instance, my daughter penned “menus” that set out not only what we were eating, course by course, but also established the timing of things like a toast and a “short intermission” devoted to game playing. Setting one at each place not only looks pretty cute, but it also gives fair warning that fun is on the menu — again, without you having to actually say that and make the teenagers cringe. This year, my daughter is painting designs onto river rocks that represent something about each guest, with the plan to have everyone find their place by correctly guessing which rock is theirs.

Keep a game up your sleeve. If the conversation heats up or falls short during dinner, Fishel recommends the “family memory” game. How it works: Someone thinks of an event that involved every family member at the table, and the other guests have to ask questions to try and figure out what it was. ("Did it happen on vacation? Was someone crying? Were we under 6? Was there food involved?") The game makes a great way “to share memories that are funny or memorable and to hear from kids about what memories are top of their mind,” she notes.

Other kinds of games can help occupy that long lull before dessert. My family has had success with classics such as charades, Catch Phrase and Pictionary. (We had relative success with that last one, once making a cousin's new wife cry with what I'm assuming was our overcompetitiveness.) When choosing a board game, Scott Cooper, owner of Blue Highway Games in Seattle, recommends the following guidelines for crowd-friendly holiday picks:

• Quick setup and not too many rules to learn and remember
• Interesting decisions to keep it engaging but light enough that it can be social with plenty of chatting and/or laughing
• An hour or less to play
• Flexible number of players to ideally allow people to come and go

For a newer option, Cooper likes Telestrations, a drawing game that, he notes, “works best with people who aren't artists and also works great for multiple ages.” In this Pictionary cousin, players work simultaneously ("so there's no waiting or downtime"), either drawing a given word or phrase, or whispering to their neighbor what they think someone else has sketched. At the end of the game, after each drawing has made its way around the table, the fun is in “seeing how it changes, much like the classic game of telephone."

Cooper also recommends Timeline, which, he says, “is a great trivia game for those of us who aren't great at trivia, and works well with kids and adults playing together.” That's because players don't need to know great detail about various historical events or cultural moments. Rather, they simply need to guess if one happened before or after another one.

"As the game progresses, they have to be more and more specific about putting an event in the right location in a timeline,” Cooper says. Variations are also available that let you place things such as scientific discoveries or species of dinosaurs on a timeline — should you want to give your grandkids an excellent chance of beating you.