When Thanksgiving is done right, families evenly divide the labor so that everything gets done and nobody works too hard. Someone takes charge of roasting the turkey, others contribute with sides, somebody is on dishes, and there’s always one family member happy to mix up some cocktails.
While most families shouldn’t have to resort to aggressive tactics to ensure this balance, Colleen Rast Cederberg, 31, has created a unique solution to keep the labor duties in her family. She made a “Thanksgiving Draft.”
“My sisters were spending all day cooking, and my brothers were spending all evening cleaning and I was just kind of hearing from both sides that there was kind of an imbalance,” Rast Cederberg, the middle child of 5 siblings, told Fox News Digital.
Rast Cederberg explained how the draft works in a TikTok video that has been seen 650,000 times.
“This is how I do Thanksgiving so that my siblings and I don’t kill each other,” Rast Cederberg opens her video. “We give every dish a point value from one to three. The cranberry dish is a one and the turkey is a three.”
Thanksgiving Draft 2023
@crcederberg Thanksgiving Draft 2023 #thanksgiving @gregrast0
In the weeks leading up to the holiday, the family jumps on a video call to choose their particular dishes, just like NFL general managers do during their annual draft. They also decide who’s on cleaning and dish duty.
“We all draft what dishes we want to make,” she says in the video. “We also do this thing called ‘flex kitchen,’ which means you basically hang out in the kitchen for an hour and our job is to keep the kitchen clean – so unload the dishwasher if it’s ready, helping out the people cooking, whatever it takes to keep the kitchen moving.”
While some family members think it’s a little too rigid to outline of “rules and responsibilities on Thanksgiving,” Rast Cederberg says everyone happily participates in the system.
The Thanksgiving Draft has received a lot of love in the TikTok comments section from people who love organization. “My type A personality is obsessed with this. Dear lord, I wish my family was like this lol,” Nicole A Gaskins wrote. “I have never desired hanging out with people as much as I do right now. Omg the organization, the spreadsheets. It’s all so beautiful,” Buzzsaw408 added.
One big question in the comments inspired a quick follow-up video from Rast Cederberg. “I wanna know the root fight that happened where this was the solution?” Optimistic asked.
“I had older siblings that were doing all the cooking and younger siblings that were doing all of the cleaning and this was my solution to kind of smooth everything between the two factions because everyone should do a little bit of both,” Rast Cederberg said in a subsequent TikTok post.
Once you thought that Rast Cederberg’s draft was taking Thanksgiving organization as far as it can go, she dropped this nugget: An AI-generated schedule for cooking the holiday meal. She fed ChatGPT all of the recipes she is going to make on Thanksgiving, and it created a detailed cooking schedule for the entire meal.
More Thanksgiving planning hacks this one complements of @bjc6109
@crcederberg More Thanksgiving planning hacks this one complements of @bjc6109 #thanksgiving #chatgpt #planning #holiday