Animal Crossing: New Horizons: 2021’s Turkey Day has minor changes

Last year’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons introduced (or reintroduced us) to Franklin, the Turkey who wants you to be aware that there’s other things you could eat today that ISN’T turkey. Sort of like the Chick-fil-A cow but without both the hooves and homophobia.

In that event, you had to bring Franklin various ingredients from around the island such as manilla clams and sea bass which he’d use to make food for the Turkey Day bash. But since he last left us, we’ve learned how to grow crops, learn recipes, and make our own food. So is that reflected in the second Turkey Day in New Horizons? Thankfully, yes! It just won’t feel like it at first.

Franklin is handing out in the town square. When you meet him he’ll tell you about food he wants to cook and what he needs to make it. The very first task is three manilla clams which just involve digging at the beach for a minute. From there it gets a little tougher. Each finished dish earns you prizes. Wallpaper, rugs, tables, etc.

One of the first changes to this year’s event is that for the third dish he wants to add carrots, which means you better have started farming because unless you’re gonna get lucky with Kapp’n’s Island Tour or have a friend with carrots you’re gonna have some trouble. I had no trouble cause, luckily, I started my farm early.

Once you’re done with the main four dishes, Frankling offers you four recipes so that you can make these four dishes yourself. Then, Franklin talks about possibly making them better and asks you to bring him other ideas. He offers no hints as to what these are but says some of your villagers might know. Unfortunately, the majority of your villagers are all starring at the plates on the table.

So all that leaves is visiting the villagers that stayed home. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but since they added cooking, sometimes, when you visit villagers, just like how sometimes they’d be making DIY recipes, they can no sometimes be cooking.

All your villagers that stayed home will all be cooking and will each want a fish. In my case, I ended up needing three-horse mackerels and a yellow perch to get all four recipes. When you hand them their fish of choice they’ll say something like, “you know what really makes a crab dish good? A Dungeness crab.” It’s a bit slower than the main missions but you do get the joy of seeing your villagers cute and if you thought Coco was adorable when she was just nuking TV dinners, you haven’t witnessed her getting her cook on.

Once you get the final four missions done that’s about it for the event. No big fanfare or anything like that. But the items you get have a ton of detail and personality and while I’m not the biggest fan of this particular type of year I can’t ignore the fact that these prize items are oozing with personality. Here’s a bunch of them together just to give you an idea of several prizes.

Hope you all came out of your food comas long enough to enjoy this event.

By the way, if you miss the event, the recipes will be for sale at the Nook store starting tomorrow on “Nook Friday”.