Meghan Markle Reveals What Famous Guest Showed Up at the Sussex Family Thanksgiving Last Year

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have an open door policy for their friends on holidays — and one famous friend of theirs showed up for Thanksgiving last year!

In an interview with Marie Claire, the Duchess of Sussex, 43, said that feminist icon Gloria Steinem stopped by the Montecito home she shares with husband Prince Harry, 40, and their kids Prince Archie, 5, and Princess Lilibet, 3.

“I was thinking about, in the past few years of having Thanksgiving here, like many of us, I think you always make sure there’s room at the table for your friends who don’t have family, which is really key,” she said, adding Steinem “came for Thanksgiving” in 2023.

Thanksgiving at the Sussex home is “always pretty low-key,” Meghan said, adding that “being close to my mom is great,” referring to Doria Ragland, Meghan’s mother who lives nearby the family of four.

“We’re always making sure we have something fun to do,” Meghan told Marie Claire of the holiday. “Like any other family, you spend time having a great meal and then what do you do? Play games, all the same stuff, someone brings a guitar — fun.”

“I love the holidays,” Meghan added, saying of her kids that they are now “3 and 5, so every year it gets better.”

“At first, I think as a mom with children you’re just enjoying having them there, but they’re not understanding everything that’s happening yet,” Meghan continued. “But now we’re at the age where I just can’t wait to see it through their lens every year.”

It’s important to her, she said, that Archie and Lilibet experience the “magic” of traditions like “great recipes that they end up connecting to a formative memory” at Thanksgiving. For Christmas, the family puts out “carrots for the reindeer.”

“Every single holiday is a new adventure,” Meghan said.

During a November 2021 appearance on her friend Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, DeGeneres asked about the family’s Thanksgiving plans that year. “I love to cook,” Meghan said. “We’ll be home and just sort of relax and settle in. It’s our second Thanksgiving at home in California, so it will be nice.”

DeGeneres, who also lives in Montecito, then joked, “What time should we show up?”

Five years earlier, in 2016 — her first Thanksgiving since meeting her future husband Prince Harry — Meghan revealed she cooked the perfect Thanksgiving turkey in a throwback photo on her now-deleted Instagram. In a photo beside a delicious looking turkey, Meghan wrote, “Oh, that time I roasted a pretty perfect Thanksgiving turkey! The question is, can I do it again? The pressure is on!”

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In a post on her former lifestyle blog, The Tig, Meghan wrote of Thanksgiving as a child, “Despite the contrast of my two worlds growing up, there was a powerful commonality: both my parents came from little, so they made a choice to give a lot — buying turkeys for homeless shelters at Thanksgiving, delivering meals to patients in hospice care, donating any spare change in their pocket to those asking for it, and performing quiet acts of grace — be it a hug, a smile or a pat on the back to show ones in need that they would be alright.”

“This is what I grew up seeing, so that is what I grew up being: a young adult with a social consciousness to do what I could, and to, at the very least, speak up when I knew something was wrong.”

Source people.com