Every now and then, life gives you moments that remind you what really matters — family, tradition, and the memories we build together. In this blog, I’m sharing something especially close to my heart: an essay written and delivered for class by my daughter, a freshman at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
It’s a glimpse into one of our family traditions, told through her eyes. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. — LeAnn
Written by Elise Achtenberg
Whenever people ask me what I’m doing for Thanksgiving they are always met with some slight hesitation before I say that I make sausage. Every year on the days leading up to Thanksgiving, my family makes hundreds of pounds of pork sausage. I’ve always found it a little weird, but that’s not to say I don’t love and appreciate it.
To learn more about this tradition I decided to interview my mom, LeAnn Case, who has been making sausage for Thanksgiving since before I was born. I’ll also share a little bit about my favorite memories made from this tradition.
For this Thanksgiving tradition, we all gather at my grandparent’s house and take hundreds of pounds of pork and butcher and grind it. Then we stuff the casings and smoke the sausage.
Over the years many people have come and gone. Some years, my grandpa’s shop is full of not only family but friends too; and some years, it’s just a few people each doing a job to get the sausage made.
One thing I’ve always loved about this tradition is that it’s a place for people to come together whether or not they are related to us.
To get a deeper understanding of this tradition I asked my mom, LeAnn Case, on February 27th, 2025, about how and why it started and what it means to her. She has been a part of the tradition since it started and she started another small tradition of making t-shirts for everyone to wear every year on Thanksgiving day, too.
My mom grew up butchering pigs or cows and making sausage on a farm, so when this tradition started it was nothing new to her. She said that the reason it started was because her cousin was envious that she never learned how to make sausage and wanted to learn.
The first year they did it, my mom and her family all gathered to make sausage and other family recipes. She said that the reason we now do it on Thanksgiving is because it was a time when people had work off and were able to all get together so they kept it on Thanksgiving since the first time in 1998.
To her, this tradition is a way to honor our family’s roots and she loves the fellowship that it brings. For my mom, growing up making sausage was about being able to put food on their table, so to know that it has evolved into something that we can just have fun doing is really special.
When my mom started making the t-shirts it was when they realized that making sausage was becoming a tradition and she wanted to add to the experience. So in 2008 she designed the first t-shirt with a pig (that my grandma named Otis) on it. And since then we’ve had Otis in different outfits on a t-shirt every year. His outfits would always represent the time or something happening that year.
One of my favorite memories from all the years I’ve made sausage for Thanksgiving was in 2022. This was the year when I was in charge of knowing how many pounds of sausage each person got and knowing who was doing what job. I would calculate how much of each ingredient we would need for the amount of sausage we were making and I would make sure each person’s batch was separated.
Doing this really taught me how much goes into this tradition and how many peoples’ hands really go into it. This was the same year that our sausage stuffer blew up and I was a second away from getting hit by a shard of plastic! That was just one of many things that went wrong that year. That goes to show I wasn’t the only one who had a memorable Thanksgiving in 2022.
After interviewing my mom, I now see how much this tradition is important to my family. It represents our heritage and our ability to come together using what we have and what we know. She showed me that experience and memories are what’s most important. Although this tradition might not be what you would expect, it has taught me to appreciate the time I get to spend with my family and gave me a deeper understanding of what tradition means.