We all have family traditions, whether it’s family dinner every Sunday, spending the night with our grandparents on Christmas Eve, or going deer hunting with our brother. While most families have these traditions, some take them to a whole other level, adding their own unique elements.

Every Thanksgiving, the Comer family gets together for their annual Thanksgiving dinner. While the dinner itself is not that much different from the typical family Thanksgiving, it’s what the Comers do the night before that spices things up. Every Thanksgiving-eve, the Comers spend the night playing a board game, but the board game they play isn’t for nothing. The prize? The privilege of breaking the wishbone of the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner.

“The wishbone is almost the most important part of the dinner,” junior Patrick Comer said. “All my brothers wanted a chance to break the wishbone, and being kids, we began to argue and then fights broke out. So to prevent it, my parents started making us play the game Sorry.”

Last Thanksgiving marked the fifth year since they began this, and the Comers have every intent of keeping it going into the future.

“We need this. If we stopped, we’d resort back to our savage ways and fight over it again, so it’s nice because it keeps the family at peace,” Patrick said.

Living in Texas, a lot of people go on annual hunting trips, usually hunting dove, deer or quail. But when it comes to the McWhirter’s, they like to add a bit of a Cajun theme to their hunting trips. Every Thanksgiving the McWhirter’s head to the Trinity River to go on their yearly alligator hunting trip.

“My grandpa moved out there in 2009, and there isn’t much to do, so we started fishing and looking for small gators to tackle,” junior Lucas McWhirter said.

With a tradition like this, you expect some good stories to come out of it, and the McWhirter’s don’t disappoint.

“We were fishing and my grandpa caught a small alligator with his net,” Lucas said. “He told me to hold it in the water. It wriggled free from my grip, and I splashed in the water with it for awhile before it got away.”

Everyone who celebrates Christmas remembers as kids wanting to stay up all night to see Santa Clause, but never being allowed to by our parents. But in the Sanchez family, they get one of their presents hand delivered directly to them on Christmas Eve.

“During Christmas Eve dinner, Santa comes to our grandparents’ house and delivers one of our presents,” junior Ana Paula Sanchez said. “When he comes, we usually take pictures with Santa. Then, after all that, we go to church at midnight on Christmas.”

This tradition isn’t anything new to the Sanchez family; they’ve been doing it since before Ana Paula was even born.

“It’s been around ever since my parents were kids,” she said.

After church, they go to bed and wake up and start opening the rest of their presents. Then, for breakfast, they go out and get tacos.

These odd traditions help bring families closer together, but they also go beyond that. It’s important to have traditions that are handed down from generation to generation, honoring the older family members who started them. They also make families unique, and in turn, brings the members closer.