CCFB News» November 2025

Are you celebrating Thanksgiving this year? According to the 2025 Butterball Togetherness Report, 89% of Americans plan on celebrating the holiday this year, with 84% of celebrants eating turkey. Hosts expect an average of nine attendees.

Turkey remains a staple in American diets: the United States Department of Agriculture projects that for the whole 2025 year, 4.45 billion pounds of turkey will be eaten this year, or an average of 13 pounds per person.

Thanksgiving wouldn’t be possible without farmers. More than 200 million turkeys are raised on farms across the U.S. The average weight of a Thanksgiving turkey is 15 pounds, which takes approximately 15-17 weeks for a growing bird to reach that weight. Farmers also produce all of the other fixings on the Thanksgiving table: corn, wheat, vegetables, cranberries, even soybeans and peanuts for oil.

Growing up, Thanksgiving was one of my favorite holidays. My mom always went all out on the meal: a giant turkey, a mountain of mashed potatoes with brown gravy, Stovetop stuffing, canned cranberries, green bean casserole, sweet corn, my mom’s secret family recipe for Polish cucumber salad mizeria, my cousins’ favorite Pillsbury dinner rolls, and candied yams with campfire-size marshmallows with syrup on top. We always had apple cider to drink and pumpkin pie for dessert.

Thanksgiving is always a difficult time of the year for my family, ever since my mom passed away in 2016. Instead of celebrating the traditional way with turkey and all of the fixings, my cousins and I gather together over pizza, Chinese food, or barbecue.

This Thanksgiving, my cousins and I haven’t decided if we’ll be gathering together to celebrate at someone’s house or at a restaurant, but I am looking forward to seeing them. Regardless of where we’ll eat, I’ll be sure to bring along a giant Tupperware container full of chocolate chip cookies, which are my cousins’ favorite homemade dessert.

I remember making a batch of chocolate chip cookies as a snack when my cousins and I went to a baseball game. The girls sat in the front row, and the boys sat in the row behind. My male cousins asked to try the cookies I brought along, and I reached behind me to hand them the Tupperware. About 10 minutes later, I turned around and asked them for the container back, because I felt like having a snack. They replied, “What cookies…?” and showed an empty container, without any crumbs left.

Since then, I’ve always made a double batch of my soft chocolate chip cookies for any family gathering. They’re a huge hit! Once, I tried bringing along another type of dessert, and it was quickly devoured. However, my cousins still asked me all night long about my chocolate chip cookies and why I didn’t bring any.

A few years ago, I entered my cookies into the local county fair, and they won third place out of more than 30 entries. I can proudly say with official bragging rights that I have the third-best chocolate chip cookies in the county, as well as the best herb biscuits (my biscuits won a blue ribbon).

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope that your celebration is full of your favorite foods. I know that mine will be full of chocolate chip cookies!