At 8 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning, while most of Middle Tennessee is still asleep, a crowd in turkey costumes will gather on the field at Nissan Stadium and start running. Some will finish in under twenty minutes. Others will walk a mile with a dog in a bandana trotting beside them. Either way, they will have started the holiday moving toward something, instead of just waiting for the table to be ready.
Nashville’s Thanksgiving Starts With a Trot and a Waddle
The Music City Turkey Trot returns to Nissan Stadium on Thursday, November 26, with a 5K at 8 a.m. and a 1-Mile Waddle at 8:10, both starting and finishing inside the stadium. Run Nash, the host organization, is leaning into the silliness of the morning: runners are encouraged to dress in Thanksgiving costumes, with prizes for the best three, and dogs can register for their own race bib, finisher medal and bandana through a Doggie Dash option.
Race director Malain McCormick said the event is built around the idea that it “brings families, friends and neighbors together to kick off Thanksgiving.”
Underneath the costumes is a cause: the race spotlights STARS Nashville, a nonprofit that has run mental health services, counseling and prevention programs for young people and families across Middle Tennessee for more than 40 years. Registration ranges from $25 to $60, and every entry fee becomes a small, practical push toward that work.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
A Nashville Bourbon Finishes Aging Where the Music Did
Dierks Bentley’s ROW 94 bourbon brand is sending a new limited batch, Trespasser’s Proof, to finish its aging on the grounds of the Grand Ole Opry. The four-barrel batch begins at Green River Distilling Co. in Kentucky and ages at least four years before moving to a secure spot at the Opry, where it started its final stage on November 4.
The detail worth sitting with is the wood. The staves finishing this bourbon are hard white oak and sugar maple, the same species used in the Ryman Auditorium’s historic stage and the wooden circle still built into today’s Opry floor. The bourbon’s name nods to Bentley’s own early days in Nashville, when he was known for sneaking backstage to get closer to the music he loved. He said he’s “spent most of my life trying to get closer to the music,” sometimes through doors he wasn’t supposed to walk through.
A limited release is planned for early 2027 at around $100 a bottle. In the meantime, Bentley opened the first ROW 94 Tasting Room on November 5 at Nashville’s Bode Hotel, and a new guided tour through Music Row, Lower Broadway and the Gulch begins November 7.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
How One Louisville Neighborhood Took Its Housing Back
In 2019, Nachand Trabue started noticing “We buy houses” signs spreading across Smoketown, her historically Black Louisville neighborhood and the birthplace of Muhammad Ali. Trabue, a fourth-generation resident, began pulling the signs out of the ground herself, then went further: she contacted the city’s land bank to find out which vacant lots it still controlled, and reached out to a local nonprofit developer to ask what could be done.
What followed was not one person’s effort but a whole neighborhood’s. Older residents with deep roots, organized as the Smoketown Originals, carried the idea through churches, community centers and youth centers. Theresa Boyd, now executive director of the Smoketown Community Land Trust, said the deeper damage of divestment is that it teaches people they have no voice at all — residents needed reminding, in her words, that “you actually have a say in what goes on in your community.”
A community land trust works by having a nonprofit buy and hold the land itself, so the homes built on it stay cheaper and resale stays affordable for whoever buys next. In 2020, Smoketown’s push won a city proposal worth $2.1 million. By 2023 the trust was formalized. Its first houses are now built, and more lots are already chosen.
Read the full story at Reasons to be Cheerful.
Before You Sign Up to Volunteer This Thanksgiving
Every year, the same thing happens: a lot of people decide, around the same week, that this is the year they finally volunteer — and soup kitchens end up with more hands than they can use on the one day everyone shows up. A little planning turns good intentions into actual help. Some options to consider:
- Feeding America or Meals on Wheels — call ahead; holiday slots fill fast, but routes later in the season are often wide open.
- Operation Turkey — a defined four-hour shift packing meals, 8 a.m. to noon.
- Goodwill or United Way — useful if you have a professional skill to offer, not just time to sort donations.
- Local soup kitchens and animal shelters — often running on the same small crew all year, and glad for a call a week out.
- Gift-a-Family — for sponsoring a family’s holiday wishlist from home.
Even a turkey trot entry fee, like the one at Nissan Stadium, quietly becomes a donation. The point isn’t to find the one perfect way to help. It’s to actually show up somewhere that needs it.
Read the full story at The Optimist Daily.
A race route, a barrel of bourbon, a reclaimed city block, a volunteer shift planned instead of improvised — none of it is dramatic on its own. But each one is someone deciding that showing up, carefully and on purpose, beats waiting for things to simply work out. If something is going right in your corner of the Boro, we’d like to hear about it.