How I Met Your Mother became known after Season 3 for "Slapsgiving," an annual repetition of the combination of Marshall and Barney's slap bet with the holiday. However, despite the iconic nature of the Slap Bet, the series' first Thanksgiving episode "Belly Full of Turkey" was actually better. Without the unrelated gimmick to overshadow the character development, "Belly Full of Turkey" was able to actually explore the meaning of the holiday, the idea of family and its characters more than any subsequent attempts.
"Belly Full of Turkey" had three parallel stories; Robin was mostly an observer because as she stated, "I'm Canadian. Real Thanksgiving happened over a month ago." In the A-plot, Lily and Marshall spent the holidays with Marshall's family while Lily feared she'd gotten pregnant. In the B-plot, Barney's future fianceé Robin and Ted discovered Barney working in a soup kitchen and attempted to reconcile that reveal with the Barney they knew. Finally, Ted was stuck in the city for the holidays because his firm was designing a tobacco company building. Through these three premises, the episode explored Thanksgiving in a unique way.
How I Met Your Mother Asked What Made a Good Family
"Belly Fully of Turkey" discussed the nature of family. Stuck in Minnesota with the Eriksens, Lily was made uncomfortably aware of the dramatic difference between how she was raised and Marshall's background, and forced for the first time to ask whether one of TV's most beloved couples was truly compatible, despite their ample love for each other. Lily was independent and a lover of fine arts; Marshall's family expected a conservative housewife. Would she become trapped in a home that would stifle her? Did she not fit into Marshall's world, or he in hers?
The episode also asked what makes a truly charitable person. Ted longed to do some form of good on the holiday in order to balance out the evils his company was perpetuating, but was met with constant failure. This feeling was compounded by Barney suddenly appearing as an exemplary soup kitchen volunteer and showing up Ted. The role reversal enabled the episode to incorporate the volunteering aspect of Thanksgiving -- a concept explored again in the show's best Christmas episode, Season 6, Episode 12, "False Positive."
How I Met Your Mother's New Model of Family and Charity
The first story was resolved when Marshall learned about Lily's pregnancy anxiety and realized that they don't need to copy his family's traditions. Rather, they can have "their own ways to horrify the people [their] kids bring home." They did so in Season 3, starting their own tradition with close friends, some recurring quirky rituals and their own home in New York City. Lily and Marshall had to both let go of parts of their family history in order to forge ahead together.
Elsewhere, Barney finally found a way for Ted to do some good: buying a homeless man a lap dance at a strip club's Thanksgiving day buffet. The scene was the opposite of the Eriksen house's conservative table. But despite flying in the face of every conventional ideal of family and happiness, the sight of three good friends finding some solace in each other -- Barney's volunteer work was revealed to be court-mandated, and Robin extended a hand of comfort to Ted as well -- was just as happy a vision as any Norman Rockwell image.
"Belly Full of Turkey" explored different kinds of Thanksgivings and aspects of the holiday not often touched on. It also presented new ideas of the family model. That gave the episode more to say about Thanksgiving and its various meanings than any other Turkey Day plot in How I Met Your Mother's nine seasons.
How I Met Your Mother is now streaming on Hulu.