Thanksgiving has the family seating chart. Friendsgiving has no seating chart at all — just whoever can make it, a table that’s somehow always one leaf short, and someone’s studio apartment that was never built to hold twelve people and a turkey. Every year the same group texts the same question: whose place this time? This year, the answer doesn’t have to be anyone’s place. It can be a Loring Park mansion built for exactly this.
Why a Mansion Solves the Friendsgiving Problem
300 Clifton books as a single, whole-house rental in addition to individual rooms, which means the friend group that’s outgrown someone’s kitchen table can take over the entire 1887 Eugene J. Carpenter Mansion instead. The formal dining room seats a real crowd under a coffered ceiling and stained glass — the kind of room a group photo actually looks good in — and nobody has to fold up card tables in a hallway to fit everyone.
Nobody has to host, either, in the sense that matters most: nobody has to clean. The mansion’s guest rooms — Crystal Mansion, the Georgian, the Grand Edwardian, Coachman’s, Blacksmith’s Forge, the Hayloft and the Estate rooms — split a bigger group across the house without anyone sleeping on a pull-out couch, and everyone still ends up in the same living spaces for the actual gathering.
What Happens After the Dishes (Which You Also Don’t Have to Do)
Friendsgiving’s real advantage over Thanksgiving is that nobody has to leave early for another house. So the night doesn’t have to end when the plates are cleared. The four-season garden hot tub stays open under the stars for however many people can fit, and downstairs, Gertrude’s Cistern — the mansion’s speakeasy and haunted video lounge, with heated reclining seats — is exactly the kind of room a friend group ends up in at 10 p.m. with the last of the wine.
When to Book It
Thanksgiving itself falls on Thursday, November 26, 2026, and most Friendsgivings land on one of the two weekends around it — the weekend before (November 20–22) when people are traveling home and want one night together first, or the weekend after (November 27–29) when out-of-towners are already back in the Twin Cities for the holiday and looking for a reason to not go home yet. Both weekends are already on the calendar for anyone hosting a proper sit-down dinner: Loring Park, a two-minute walk from the mansion’s front door, is at its quietest and prettiest in late November if a pre- or post-dinner walk is part of the plan.
Friendsgiving itself is a young tradition — the word barely existed before the 2010s — but it has become one of the more reliable reasons a scattered friend group reunites every year, and a house built specifically for gathering people together tends to do more of the work than a rental with a six-person dining table.
What’s Included
Direct bookings currently include a $20 Pillsbury Club dining voucher and a $20 Minneapolis Trolley voucher (see the current terms on the vouchers page, since the exact per-stay or per-night wording is still being finalized on our end) — useful for a group that wants one dinner out at the Pillsbury Club mansion across town, or a haunted trolley ride between the turkey and the pie. Check the specials and packages page for current whole-house and multi-night rates before the November weekends fill in. If your group is bigger than the mansion’s rooms can hold in one stay, Oakland’s on 9th — a furnished, month-to-month studio building a few blocks away — is a practical overflow option for anyone who wants their own kitchen the morning after.
Ready to make this the year nobody hosts Friendsgiving at their own apartment? See rates and book your rooms, or read more about the mansion’s own history while you plan the guest list.
Keep reading: Where Should You Stay for Bluey’s Big Play at the Orpheum in Minneapolis?