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Thanksgiving is the one date in the corporate year that already means something to people, which makes it the easiest to mark and the easiest to get wrong. A distributed team cannot share a table, and the usual substitute — a call where everyone takes a turn saying what they are grateful for — asks a lot of people and gives them nothing to do with their hands.
The alternative is to give the hour a task. Below: the six Thanksgiving workshops Rockoly runs, what a head costs, and the ideas worth running yourself without paying anyone.
The six Thanksgiving workshops
Every one runs 60 minutes with a live chef, and the ingredients arrive at each participant’s door beforehand. That is the part that makes a remote Thanksgiving work: everybody is cooking the same thing at the same time, rather than watching one person cook.
- Butternut Bisque — the soup course, and the highest-rated of the set.
- Turkey Roulade — the closest thing to the centrepiece, rolled and roasted rather than a whole bird nobody has an oven for.
- Candied Sweet Potato Bites — the side dish that argues about marshmallows, in miniature.
- Cran Chicken with Stuffing — chicken with cranberry and stuffing, for teams who want the plate without the turkey.
- Roasted Cran Goat Cheese — the appetiser, and the one that doubles as a happy-hour opener.
- Cream Cheese Pumpkin Bars — dessert, and the easiest of the six for people who claim they cannot cook. Rockoly’s wider baking workshops run the same way.
Three of those are new this season. If you have run a Rockoly Thanksgiving before, the lineup is not the one you booked last year.
What it costs
The rate steps down as the group grows: $139 per person for 5 to 30 guests, $129 for 31 to 50, and $119 above 50. Under five people it is a $695 flat rate, with a five-seat minimum — worth knowing before you plan around a group of four.
That covers the live chef and the host who runs the session, a dedicated event planner, every ingredient delivered, free customization, and the engagement activities built into the hour. Free shipping applies within the US.
Book it around the shipping, not the chef
The constraint on a virtual Thanksgiving is not whether a chef is free. It is whether the kit reaches every address before the day, and that gets harder in the last week of November than at any other point in the year, because every carrier in the country is under the same pressure.
So the useful move is to collect addresses early. Ask your planner what their cut-off is for the date you want rather than assuming the standard one holds through the holiday run.
The ideas worth doing yourself
Not everything needs a vendor, and a good Thanksgiving hour often mixes one booked thing with two free ones.
Write the thank-yous down. Ask people to name one specific thing a colleague did this year — not “great teamwork”, an actual incident. Specificity is what makes it land, and it is the whole reason the generic version falls flat. It costs nothing, it is the closest thing to the holiday’s actual subject, and it belongs in the same conversation as any other employee appreciation you do.
Give the hour to something else entirely. A team that volunteers together — remotely or locally, on company time rather than a Saturday — gets more out of it than most structured activities deliver, and the company time is the part that signals it is meant.
Run a lunch and learn with a real subject. Native American history is the obvious one for the date and is usually handled badly; done properly, with a prepared speaker rather than a slide someone made that morning, it is better than another game. If nobody can prepare it properly, do something else instead.
Keep the icebreakers short. Five minutes at the top of a call is a warm-up. Twenty minutes is a meeting nobody asked for.
Where this fits in the wider holiday run
Thanksgiving is the front end of a season that runs to January, and the same team usually books twice. The holiday specials page carries the December lineup, so if you are choosing a Thanksgiving date it is worth looking at both at once — the second booking is easier to get a good slot for when it is made in October rather than after the first one lands.
For teams that would rather drink than cook, a virtual happy hour or a wine tasting fills the same hour. For something with a puzzle in it, the happy hour murder mystery is the game Rockoly actually runs.
The practical bits
Everything ships with all ingredients included and free US delivery, and international delivery is available on request — ask your planner, because those addresses need longer.
Dietary requirements are handled at no extra cost when you share them in advance, which for a kit means before it is packed rather than before the session. That is the deadline that actually matters, and it is earlier than people expect.
When you have a date and a rough headcount, the form on the Thanksgiving events page reaches a planner, and the full virtual catalogue has everything else Rockoly runs if none of the six is right.