Host a Pot Luck Thanksgiving Meal for a Large Family

Hosting any dinner with a large family can become over bearing to say the least. The expense and time spent on hosting such a dinner can be countless. In these days and ages, who has the extra time to spend shopping, preparing and cooking? I also come from a large family and I am the one that host the Holiday dinners. I am a stay at home mom but that surely does not mean I have free time on my hands and money is even less. I trade having less money from not working for the time to spend with the kids and volunteering with their activities. So time and money are both limited in our house. Many years ago I agreed to host the holiday dinners but to make these dinners less of a burden on my family we came up with the idea that the holiday dinners would be a pot luck.

We started the first pot luck holiday with Thanksgiving. My contribution to the family pot luck meal is always the turkey, gravy & mashed potatoes. Naturally since I am hosting the family dinner I also contribute more of my time, house and small things like salt, pepper, butter, etc. We have six additional families and each family is assigned to bring a certain food, dessert or drink. If your family is larger than mine you can divide the meal differently.

This is the way I divide up the Thanksgiving pot luck meal: someone in the family will make a ham, someone is in charge of bringing all beverages such as wine, soda, beer and juice, someone is in charge of bringing sweets such as pumpkin pies, cheesecake, etc, someone is in charge of the casseroles such as green bean casseroles, broccoli soufflé, etc., someone will bring salads such as lettuce, pasta, macaroni, potato, etc.

As you can see Holiday meals can be a lot easier if everyone pitches in a helps take the burden off the Host of the dinner. My mother use to cook the whole meal and I can see just how the Holidays got a bit too much for her to handle over the years. I took the burden off of my mom by starting to host the Holiday meal at my house but with out everyone pitching in and contributing something it would be too much for me to handle also. Groceries are outrageous and it takes a lot as it is to get the basics, but when you start to add all of the extras in that you normally wouldn't buy it can get very costly.

Pot luck meals works out great but sometimes we run into a few problems but workable ones. The one problem is trying to satisfy every family member. One person in our family complains that they can't cook so she gets to buy the drinks. Even if you run into some small problems just try your best to work through them and be thankful that your family is together.