Donna Kelce shares her family’s Thanksgiving plans and traditions

The Kelce family is celebrating Thanksgiving this year without the holiday’s most iconic dish: a turkey.

“We usually just go get a ham,” Donna Kelce told exclusively We weekly while her collaboration with Ancestors®. “I’m not really into turkey.”

While Donna, 71, claimed she’s “not a good cook,” she noted that the family’s Thanksgiving menu will include several delicious pastries.

“I bake cinnamon rolls. They are always my favorite, my go-to. I can only do a few [of] times a year because they are so sugary,” she shared. “So we have sandwiches, we have muffins, cookies and things like that, and I usually do that in season.”

Donna and her ex-husband, Ed Kelceare parents of NFL stars Jason Kelce And Travis Kelce. Jason, 36, shares three daughters – Wyatt, 4, Elliotte, 2, and Bennett, 8 months – with his wife, Kylie Kelce. Travis, 34, started dating Taylor Swift in September, although Donna did not reveal whether the Grammy winner, 33, will join the group’s Thanksgiving celebrations.

Except food, Donna said Us she and her family often spend their holidays solving puzzles and playing board games. “At Christmas, years ago, we always did that [play] Mario Bros. video games,” she recalled. “We would say, ‘Okay, it’s your turn. Just see how far you can get,” and then we would make a tag team.”

The holidays can be a “tough” time of year for many people, and Donna noted that this is especially true “if your kids are playing sports,” like her sons. “You’re not home much during the holidays,” she explained. “We would travel a lot. We were supposed to be in Florida, St. Augustine, visiting family, Disney [World]Marco Island and Fort Myers. [Jason and Travis’] grandparents [and] uncles, were in Florida, so we were constantly going to Florida for the holidays.

Heading into the holidays, Donna thanks all the people who helped Jason and Travis achieve their athletic dreams while keeping the brothers sober.

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“They had phenomenal coaches, fantastic teachers and great supportive families around us because we traveled so much [for] baseball, football – really nice individuals who are still friends to me to this day,” Donna shared Us. “And I think it was a menagerie of all those individuals with all those great qualities that they passed on all these years, and I’m just really happy that they were given those opportunities and that they turned into the men that they are . .”

Keeping her family’s holiday traditions alive is something Donna is excited to do through her new partnership with Ancestry®. “They have the ability to upload photos and recipes and things like that, which really intrigued me, and that’s why I decided to work with them,” she said Us. “And even audio stories, for future generations. So that was very important.”

Donna also noted that the service – which uses DNA and data to trace a person’s genealogical history – helped her “discover things in my past that I wanted to know.”

With reporting by Christina Garibaldi