Tag: Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving 2025! This is when we take a welcome moment to pause, reflect, and reconnect. Whether you celebrate with a traditional family gathering, a lively Friendsgiving dinner, or a quiet meal at home, this holiday offers a powerful reminder: gratitude is not a once-a-year activity. It is a mindset that transforms how we experience both our daily lives and our increasingly digital world.

As we enter the 2025 holiday season, many of us continue to live in two parallel worlds: both our IRL (In-Real-Life) world, with all its people and places, and our online environment, filled with information, opportunities, and communities. Both deserve recognition. Thanksgiving is an ideal time to acknowledge the tools, technologies, and human connections that make our lives better every single day.

This article explores the meaning of Thanksgiving with family, the rise of Friendsgiving, and an appreciation of everyday blessings—both online and “IRL.” You’ll also find fun and helpful online resources worth being thankful for, complete with direct URLs you can explore.

Thanksgiving With Family: A Tradition Rooted in Connection

When most people think of Thanksgiving, the image of a family gathering around a table naturally comes to mind. While every family’s traditions differ, the central theme remains connection. For many, Happy Thanksgiving 2025 represents an opportunity to reunite with loved ones, revisit cherished recipes, and savor the comfort of shared memories.

Thanksgiving meals often include dishes passed down through generations—such as turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and desserts that evoke fond memories of childhood. Family gatherings ground us, reminding us of where we come from and the values that help us navigate life.  These annual rituals create a rhythm that carries meaning from one year to the next.

But Thanksgiving isn’t only about food. It is also about storytelling. Catching up with relatives, celebrating victories from the past year, and offering support through any hardships. It is about putting relationships first. At its core, Thanksgiving serves as a poignant reminder that even in a fast-paced world, family time remains essential.

Friendsgiving 2025: A Modern Celebration of Chosen Family

Happy Thanksgiving 2025

Over the past decade, Friendsgiving has grown from a quirky gathering to a mainstream cultural event.  Friendsgiving allows people to celebrate the holiday with the friends who play essential roles in their lives—especially when they live far from family or prefer a more relaxed, informal celebration.

What makes Friendsgiving unique is its flexibility. Friends often split cooking duties, embrace potluck-style dinners, host themed gatherings, or adapt recipes to fit different dietary preferences. It is a celebration rooted in inclusiveness, creativity, and laughter.

In 2025, Friendsgiving has become even more meaningful as work schedules, travel costs, and geographic mobility lead many people to form close “chosen families” wherever they live. These relationships also deserve grateful recognition. For some, Friendsgiving and Thanksgiving are now celebrated together, creating a whole holiday weekend focused on community.

Everyday Things to Be Thankful For

One of the healthiest parts of Thanksgiving is its emphasis on gratitude. While the holiday encourages us to acknowledge major blessings, such as family, health, and livelihood, it also highlights the more minor, daily things that often go unnoticed.

IRL (In Real Life) Blessings We Should Appreciate:

• A warm home, especially during the Wisconsin winter months.

• A steady job or fulfilling work, something not everyone enjoys.

• Access to healthy food is a simple but essential privilege.

• Time outdoors, whether through walking, gardening, RVing, or exploring local parks.

• Books and libraries that offer lifelong learning.

• Community organizations, such as Veterans’, youth, sports, and religious organizations, among many others, bring people together.

These everyday experiences often feel routine, but they form the foundation of a fulfilling life.

Online Blessings to Be Grateful For in 2025

Our online world is a second home—and while it’s easy to focus on the negatives, there is also plenty to be grateful for. The internet helps people learn, do business, stay connected, and find inspiration.

Here are useful online resources worth celebrating this Thanksgiving, each included with its direct URL for your reference:

1.  Wikipedia – Free Knowledge for All

A global library, freely accessible and crowdsourced, supporting learning and curiosity across every subject imaginable.

2.  Internet Archive – Preserving Books, Music, and Websites

A remarkable digital time machine with millions of free books, recordings, and archived web pages.

3.  Khan Academy – Free Education for Everyone

From math to science to economics, free learning tools empower students and adults to learn at their own pace.

4.  YouTube Learning – Tutorials for Any Skill

Whether you need to fix a faucet, learn woodworking, or master digital marketing, free video learning is a gift.

5.  Canva – Easy Online Design Tools

An intuitive platform to create beautiful images, presentations, and social graphics—even with no design experience.

6.  WordPress – Powering Small Businesses and Creators

This open-source platform powers more than a third of the web, including blogs, small businesses, and e-commerce sites.

7.  Good News Network – A Reminder of Positivity

In a world full of stress, this site highlights kindness, innovation, and uplifting stories from around the globe.

8.  AllTrails – Encouraging People to Explore Nature

A simple app that helps users find hiking, biking, and walking trails, making outdoor adventures more accessible.

9.  Zoom – Bringing People Together Anywhere

Many families now share virtual Thanksgiving greetings across states and countries thanks to accessible online video calls.

10.  Local News, Blogs, and Community Websites

Neighborhood-level information—like Wisconsin events, manufacturing news, or small business profiles—helps strengthen local communities online.

Together, these digital resources support education, creativity, entrepreneurship, and human connection. For many, they expand opportunities that previously depended on geography or financial limitations.

A Holiday Message for a Happy Thanksgiving 2025

As we celebrate Happy Thanksgiving 2025, let’s take time to appreciate the blend of tradition and modernity that shapes our lives.  Whether you spend Thanksgiving with family, Friendsgiving groups, or a thoughtful day of personal reflection, the holiday highlights a simple but powerful truth: gratitude strengthens relationships, improves well-being, and creates a positive outlook that lasts long after the holiday ends.

Take a moment today to acknowledge the people who support you, the food on your table, the opportunities you enjoy, and the technologies that make learning, creativity, and connection possible.  Gratitude is one of life’s most significant renewable resources.

Happy Thanksgiving 2025—and may your season be filled with warmth, connection, and appreciation both online and IRL.

Happy Thanksgiving 2025! We heartily welcome and invite you to copy and use the content above with attribution by including this paragraph and a live link back to this post at https://www.wisx.com/happy-thanksgiving-2025-irl-online/.

Regards,
Keith Klein
Founder & CEO
OnYourMark.com LLC

Happy Thanksgiving Day Traditions

Thanksgiving Day traditions vary widely, I’m sure.  In preparation for this holiday post, I looked up a lot of them.  While they included many great traditions, some of which we practice in our home, a couple of my favorites were missing.

First, the common traditions that we practice here are no doubt among the most common across the country. Macy’s Parade starts the day, very much as a background to the cooking and last-minute calls about who’s to bring what and when they’ll be here. It’s the ‘official’ start of Christmas movies and Christmas music playing virtually non-stop through the end of the year.  Pies and bread baking in the oven, along with a 14 to 20 pound bird and plenty of savory and sweet side dishes fill the house with mouth-watering aromas.  Gift exchanges are setup and our kids enjoy getting the names of their siblings in the secret Santa drawings.

Perhaps my favorite pastime – missing from the traditions I read about – is listening to the women in the kitchen.  Since the passing of my brother-in-law, Tom, many years ago – the family matriarchy presides over the kitchen absolutely.  Tom was perhaps the best conversationalist I’d ever known, and a great listener. Now it’s purely the women running the kitchen, from my wife and daughters to my wife’s sisters, (and formerly my mother-in-law before she passed) and they dominate the conversations about things that matter. The men are relegated to a mixing drinks, a steady stream of appetizers they can have now (vs. save that for the meal!), and to taking out the trash.  Conversations among the women range from the foods being prepared to dates for family camping in the coming year, to the progress of our adult children and our grandchildren in their pursuits and more. I enjoy the life they bring to the holiday, as well as the love and food they prepare for the table.  Of course, by this time, the guys are watching A Christmas Story or Miracle on 34th Street for the 211th time, and, of course, a football game.

The house is decorated for Thanksgiving, and the Christmas decorating begins in earnest on Thanksgiving weekend, if it hasn’t begun already.  Much like Christmas Eve, I enjoy the time after all the visitors have gone.  The time devoted to enjoying a glass of wine or a cocktail with my wife who evaluates what went well (or not), sharing some news that perhaps I hadn’t heard, and beginning plans for next year. That’s among the finest of traditions.

More Thanksgiving Day Traditions

Here are a few places to think explore more Thanksgiving Day Traditions to consider for your own family, along with a few comments.

I got a practical start to the research at a blog for International Boarding Schools, of all places.  The post, “Top 10 Thanksgiving traditions in the US” suggested this post was on the right track.

Oprah offers a nifty slide-show of 34 Unique Thanksgiving Traditions Your Family and Friends Will Adore   You may get a pop-up or two to start with, but I found the slide show easy to glide through, with nifty matching graphics and a few sentences bringing the ideas in each slide to life.

Country living shares the 30 Best Thanksgiving Traditions to Try With Your Family This Year on a single long page of “fun and unusual activities will keep the crew entertained.”

I could (maybe next Thanksgiving) do a post about Friendsgiving – a tradition I witnessed my own adult kids getting into perhaps a decade ago – and mentioned several times in the research, including the links above.  We enjoy having friends over on Thanksgiving, as well as family. I think the whole idea of Friendsgiving is a great one.  My wife has a great banner on her website, CindyCooks.com:  Treat Friends Like Family, and Family Like Friends.   The flip side of this research was learning that some traditions flat out don’t match up with what we learned about the origins of Thanksgiving, between the Pilgrims and Native Americans, in grade school. While many traditions are no doubt shared, if you Google “native american thanksgiving traditions” you may find links to “a day of mourning.”

When all is said and done, Thanksgiving to me is simply a day to celebrate our blessings and to give thanks…a shared day of celebration and thanks if you’re lucky.  Be lucky.  Happy Thanksgiving!

With all best wishes for you and yours to enjoy a Happy Thanksgiving!

Regards,

Keith Klein
Organizer, Wisconsin Business Owners
Founder & CEO, OnYourMark.com LLC

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Thanks to our friends at OnYourMark.com LLC, for preparing this post so we could share the message, and our wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving, with you.