Book Review: Two-List Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a very American and Canadian holiday, but people from other countries who live in these countries now also like to celebrate the holiday. It just might look a little different in their households.

Two-List Thanksgiving by Christine Whan and illustrated bur Sienna Youngsun Kim, tells the story of a Korean-American family getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving with their American and Korean family members.

The two lists of the title are for grocery shopping: one list for the American grocery store to get traditional American Thanksgiving foods and one for the Korean market. Mom and daughter go shopping then prepare all the foods for their feast.

Some of the ingredients are the same for both kinds of food, such as carrots used in stuffing and japchae (a noodle stir fry). But the carrots are prepared differently in each dish so they taste different.

In the end the big extended families get together and have what would sound like a normal Thanksgiving to most readers. There’s football watching and cooking, kids playing and grandparents drinking tea. They enjoy turkey and galbi (beef short ribs) and other classic Korean and American foods. (And of course there’s a joke about American grandpa trying kimchi.)

They pass around a candle and all share special things they are thankful for, and the girl realizes all her relatives are actually one family.

The author notes that she grew up having holiday meals just like this one, combining her family’s traditional foods with the usual foods of their new home.

The book is a sweet story about different cultures coming together and captures that feeling of building a new family on the traditions of the past. It also includes recipes for japchae and stuffing if you want to try mixing food cultures for your holiday feast!

This would be a nice one for a multicultural classroom or to read at home to talk about the different ways people celebrate holidays.

About the book: 40 pages, hardcover. Published 2025 by Beaming Books. Suggested retail price $19.99.

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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