Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are "always pretty low-key" about Thanksgiving, but they "love the holidays," she has said.
The Duchess of Sussex hinted the couple may have a special guest during their holiday meal as she revealed "you always make sure there's room at the table for your friends."
She said their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, are still getting their heads around what Thanksgiving means, but they learn a little more each year.
"I love the holidays," Meghan recently told Marie Claire. "At first, I think as a mom with children you're just enjoying having them there, but they're not understanding everything that's happening yet. But now we're at the age where I just can't wait to see it through their lens every year."
And she added that the kids are "three and five, so every year it gets better."
Thanksgiving will have been new to Prince Harry since the start of their relationship, since it is not celebrated in Britain. However, the couple marked the holiday in Canada as early as 2019, just months before their royal exit, so he will now be on his fifth year of celebrating it in North America.
"I was thinking about, in the past few years of having Thanksgiving here," Meghan said. "Like many of us, I think you always make sure there's room at the table for your friends who don't have family, which is really key."
In terms of how Harry and Meghan will spend Thursday, she said the couple were "always pretty low-key," but added that "being close to my mom is great."
"We're always making sure we have something fun to do," she continued. "Like any other family you spend time having a great meal and then what do you do? Play games, all the same stuff, someone brings a guitar—fun."
Harry and Meghan went to Canada for Thanksgiving in November 2019 in what would prove to be the beginning of the end of their royal careers. The couple left behind a feud with Prince William and Princess Kate to spend Thanksgiving in North America and Doria Ragland flew over from L.A. to join them.
"The Christmas decorations were not going up yet," according to royal biography Finding Freedom. "They still had Thanksgiving to think about and Meghan's mother, Doria, was preparing at that moment to travel from her home in LA to the estate in Victoria.
"Meghan and her mother, who couldn't wait to see her Archie, had been excitedly exchanging texts before the trip.
"Her grandson was growing fast and had gotten much taller since she last saw him in the summer. 'He's in the ninetieth percentile for height,' Meghan boasted to friends, before she eagerly offered to pull out her phone to show some of the many photos she had of her boy."
Harry wrote in his memoir, Spare: "November 2019. We arrived with Archie, Guy, Pula, and our nanny, under cover of darkness, on a stormy night, and spent the next few days trying to unwind. It wasn't hard.
"From morning to night we didn't have to give a thought to being ambushed [by photographers]. The house was right on the edge of a sparkling green forest, with big gardens where Archie and the dogs could play, and it was nearly surrounded by the clean, cold sea.
"I could take a bracing swim in the morning. Best of all, no one knew we were there. We hiked, we kayaked, we played—in peace."
And at the time, they sent out a Thanksgiving message from their now defunct Sussex Royal Instagram account with a maple leaf.
It read: "Wishing everyone a very happy Thanksgiving from our family to yours."
Jack Royston is Newsweek's chief royal correspondent based in London. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.
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