Every 'How I Met Your Mother' Thanksgiving Episode, Ranked (2024)

When at its best, How I Met Your Mother is a time capsule of treasured memories. A heartfelt and charming dose of nostalgia reserved for moments once forgotten but now gratefully remembered, neatly structured into sitcom form. It should be no surprise that a show dealing in the romanticization of memories would take special care with their holiday episodes.

✕ Remove Ads

Thanksgiving is a time for family and friends to pause and appreciate the people in their lives. The same should be done for How I Met Your Mother's Turkey Day entries. So sit back kids, because this is the story of the best Thanksgiving episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

How I Met Your Mother

Comedy

Drama

A father recounts to his children - through a series of flashbacks - the journey he and his four best friends took leading up to him meeting their mother.

Where to Watch

Season

stream
rent
buy

Not available

stream
rent
buy

Not available

stream
rent
buy

Not available

5 "The Rebound Girl"

Season 7, Episode 11

Every 'How I Met Your Mother' Thanksgiving Episode, Ranked (5)

✕ Remove Ads

After visiting the Long Island house that Lily’s grandparents left her, Lily (Alyson Hannigan) and Marshall (Jason Segel) question whether city life is still the right fit with a baby on the way. Elsewhere, Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) is nursing his wounds after ending his relationship to be with Robin (Cobie Smulders), only for her to choose her current boyfriend, Kevin (Kal Penn), over rekindling a romance with him. While Ted (Josh Radnor) and Barney drunkenly decide to adopt a baby together, Lily and Marshall decide that their baby will grow up on Long Island. To test run their new house, Lily and Marshall host Thanksgiving, at which point Robin locks herself in their bathroom in protest of them moving out of the city. If this wasn’t enough, Barney somehow found a baby in less than a day.

“The Rebound Girl” focuses less on Thanksgiving than the other entries in the series, with the holiday primarily used as a reason for Lily and Marshall to lure everyone to Long Island. A great bit is Lily and Marshall returning home to an apartment they now think of as tiny, with the set adjusted to visualize their newfound claustrophobia. At this point in How I Met Your Mother's run, it makes logical sense for the young couple to want more space to raise a family, but pushing the characters further away from one another does signal the show's desire to wrap up soon. On the sillier side, Ted and Barney raising a baby is one of the less plausible adventures they go on, but it does speak to the fragile mental state of both men suffering from loneliness and rejection.

✕ Remove Ads

4 "Blitzgiving"

Season 6, Episode 10

Every 'How I Met Your Mother' Thanksgiving Episode, Ranked (6)

The night before Thanksgiving, Ted leaves the bar early to get rest before hosting Thanksgiving at the apartment. He's warned that an early exit could possibly make him The Blitz, a curse that makes the recipient miss the most amazing thing possible right after they leave. Ted is confident that The Blitz still belongs to his college roommate Steve, played by Lost’s Jorge Garcia. The next morning, Ted learns the group went on an epic adventure that even involved his nemesis, Zoey (Jennifer Morrison), and The Blitz himself, Steve. To his horror, Ted realizes he has been cursed as The Blitz. After remembering Robin broke Ted's oven the night before, the group sets out on a quest to find a suitable place to make Thanksgiving dinner. Out of options, Ted is convinced by everyone to have Thanksgiving at Zoey's, where the two find common ground.

✕ Remove Ads

“Blitzgiving” is a fan-favorite episode that mixes flashbacks, sight gags, and just enough heart balanced in a way only How I Met Your Mother could pull off with ease. At the time, the Lost references hit hard as the show was still a cultural phenomenon for fans, but in later years the winks and nods to the fantasy mystery from Garcia's Steve will probably carry less weight. Seeing Zoey and Ted bond is a reminder of the rocky and uneven road ahead for the budding couple, but Ted could never pass up a challenge. It's an overall strong episode with the fun gimmick of The Blitz curse transferring to one unlucky soul after another, but “Blitzgiving” does less to build on the relationships between the cast that earlier Thanksgiving episodes excel at.

3 "Slapsgiving 2: Revenge of the Slap"

Season 5, Episode 9

Every 'How I Met Your Mother' Thanksgiving Episode, Ranked (7)

✕ Remove Ads

A recovered Thanksgiving turkey from the Port Authority lost and found leads a grateful Marshall to gift Ted and Robin one of his remaining slaps from his slap bet with Barney. The only rules are they have to decide between them who gets the slap, and they must do it before sundown. Before Ted and Robin can decide who will take a crack at Barney, a knock on the door reveals an unexpected guest – Lily's estranged father, Mickey (Chris Elliott). Mickey sits at the top of Lily's “dead to me” list after a lifetime of being an absentee father while in pursuit of his dream to make just absolutely terrible board games. Lily learns Marshall has spoken to Mickey without telling her, and she leaves upset–hurt at her husband's betrayal. With all relationships at their breaking point, it will take a Slapsgiving miracle to bring them all back together.

✕ Remove Ads

The concept of Barney's slap being the thing that brings the group together is as funny as it is torture for the suited slap receiver. Including the slap bet during a second Thanksgiving is a nice call back to one of the more rewarding recurring jokes in How I Met Your Mother's many timelines, a joke going back to Season 2, Episode 9's “Slap Bet.” On the serious side, Lily's realization that cutting people out can lead to regret is both moving and a big step for Lily as a character. Mickey is a role that could easily be so hated that audiences don't accept Lily's forgiveness, but Elliott has a talent for injecting a sympathetic likability into otherwise aggravating characters. The parody commercial for Mickey's new board game, Slap Bet, where children slap one another and an elderly woman for good measure, is an inclusion that feels more at home in an episode of Rick and Morty or South Park, but it's a testament to how inventive How I Met Your Mother strived to be.

2 "Belly Full of Turkey"

Season 1, Episode 9

Every 'How I Met Your Mother' Thanksgiving Episode, Ranked (8)

✕ Remove Ads

The first Thanksgiving episode of the series sees Lily travel with Marshall to Minnesota to bond with her future in-laws, while Ted and Robin hang back in New York, deciding to volunteer their time at a local soup kitchen. When they arrive at the soup kitchen, Ted and Robin learn that their help is not needed, especially since Barney is an unexpected volunteer of the year. Things aren't going much better for Lily, who's struggling to feel enthusiastic about her time in Marshall's hometown with the nagging unknown of a possible pregnancy hanging over her head. While Ted finds a way to get fired as a volunteer, Lily gets arrested after she storms out of the Erickson house determined to take a pregnancy test, even if that means urinating behind a convenience store. Before the night is over, Marshall and Lily make up in a jail cell and Ted and Robin go to Barney's second home–a strip club.

✕ Remove Ads

“Belly Full of Turkey” is a great recreation of the holiday experience for early 20-somethings who both search for a new tradition while others search to adjust to pre-existing ones. While later seasons of How I Met Your Mother put the core friends through interesting challenges, nothing can match Ted and the gang experiencing life as younger and less experienced adults.Lily and Marshall are deeply in love, but a romance in college is less challenging than when it's time to discuss how to raise kids and where to start a family. On the other side of the scale, it's satisfying to see Barney's charitable prowess turn into a house of cards when it's revealed to be mandated community service. Barney's adventures and conquests in later seasons will become ridiculous, turning him into a sex-crazed Bugs Bunny, but here his storyline is grounded in reality. If anything, the surprise is the crime that landed him community service wasn't worse.

1 "Slapsgiving"

Season 3, Episode 9

Every 'How I Met Your Mother' Thanksgiving Episode, Ranked (9)

✕ Remove Ads

Barney's looking forward to Thanksgiving with friends until Marshall announces the holiday has been renamed Slapsgiving. Not forgetting the slap bet he won with Barney, Marshall is cashing in his next slap for Thanksgiving Day. Barney insists slaps can't happen on holidays, but Lily, as the slap bet commissioner, allows it. Robin invites her new boyfriend to Thanksgiving dinner, a move that bothers Ted, who is still struggling from their breakup. When Ted and Robin are left alone to make pies the night before Thanksgiving, their tension at being alone for the first time since their breakup leads to regrettable and unexpected sex. On the day of Thanksgiving, Ted and Robin are left to sort out if they can be friends, and Barney looks for a way out of his impending slap.

✕ Remove Ads

Ted and Robin never quite figure out their relationship, seldom managing to be on the same page at the same time, but in “Slapsgiving”, audiences see that, despite hurt feelings, jealousy, and bad timing, they care about one another. Marshall's joy over introducing the slap bet to Thanksgiving dinner is infectious because it's one of the rare times Barney's swagger deflates. Reintroducing the slap bet is one of the examples of why How I Met Your Mother resonated with audiences. By referencing events from previous episodes, it not only fleshes out a world for the characters to exist in, but it also allows How I Met Your Mother viewers to be in on shared jokes, becoming members of the friend group. “Slapsgiving” combines all the things How I Met Your Mother does best-- sentimentality, the excitement of new traditions, and (of course) slapping Barney.

NEXT: The 10 Best 'How I Met Your Mother' Quotes, Ranked