The Bradfords' Roswell, Georgia home hums with pre-holiday-meal activity.

Casseroles warm in the oven, and wine corks pop, while guests gather around the cheese plate noshing, but Sam Bradford hasn’t joined the party quite yet.

He has a job to do.

“Hold on just a second. I think I’m getting some traction here,” he says as he works to carve the turkey with a large knife. He says of his carving skills: “I’m somewhere around Hannibal Lecter.”

The scene has all the trappings of a standard holiday season gathering, but this isn’t your standard holiday. This is Friendsgiving.

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The basic idea behind the holiday is all in the name: friends plus Thanksgiving type foods around the Thanksgiving holiday equals Friendsgiving.

That’s about where the standards end. There are no Friendsgiving origin stories or tales of the first Friendsgiving, and that means very few rules about how to celebrate or what to cook.

“It’s a time when I can try out something really unusual with my recipes,” says Sam’s wife, Valerie Bradford. (Full disclosure, she’s also my sister in law.)

She says for Thanksgiving she’ll just end up making and eating the same old casseroles. “But at Friendsgiving, you can really do something off the wall, do something untraditional,” she says.“It’s a fun time to experiment.”

This year, that meant making a pancetta-sage turkey, a recipe she got from a trendy food magazine.

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Despite her unique contribution, the rest of the spread is what you might expect at Thanksgiving. Guests pile their plates with dressing, green beans, and cranberry sauce before sitting down to eat.

One guest, Sunira Stone, says there’s a notable absence at the table: blood relatives. “Your family’s wonderful. You love them. But after some turkey and some reduced filters, things can get said, then you may not want to see them until maybe next Thanksgiving,” she says. “Whereas, that doesn’t really seem to happen at Friendsgiving.”

She eats surrounded by friends old and new, company that she says an lends easy simplicity to the gathering.

“Thanksgiving is different. A lot of people are a lot more invested. They come in with a lot of emotional baggage from 30 years of family,” she says. “Whereas, Friendsgiving, you might have only known these people for a year or two, and you just like them.”

Her husband, Jeremy Stone, agrees. “That’s part of what makes Friendsgiving special: you hang out with your closest, your best friends,” he says.

For him, friends are special kind of family. “Friends are the family that you get to choose, and that you get to choose to keep throughout your life,” he says.

He says Friendsgiving gives him a chance to celebrate those relationships and keep them strong.

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After dinner, people move from room to room as conversations emerge and recede, wine glasses refill, and dessert comes out. Nobody’s worried about opening presents, there’s no football game on the television, and no one has any early morning sales to get to.

“Here and now, everything is kind of tranquil,” says Sam Bradford, the turkey carver. “You know, for example, if we ran out of beer, I could just go get some, because it’s just a normal Sunday night.”

He says that tranquility comes from Friendsgiving’s lack of holiday baggage, something he feels acutely during Thanksgiving.

That’s because Sam Bradford is a distant relative of William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, whose book On Plymouth Plantation contains one of the few records of the first Thanksgiving. He says Friendsgiving lets him sidestep that to celebrate people he loves on his own terms.

“Maybe it’s the beginning of a whole new generation of holidays, where you have to reclaim holidays from the holidays,” he says.

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Maybe one day Friendsgiving will be a fixture in the holiday firmament, with a Friendsgiving Day Parade, Friendsgiving presents, and Day After Friendsgiving sales.

But for now, it remains relatively free of holiday-season baggage, ready for anyone to fill with whatever mix of friends, family, food they’d like.

This story also appears on Medium.

Tags: Thanksgiving, Friendsgiving, holiday season