We've all got our Thanksgiving traditions, and some of them may not make sense to others. For example, everyone in my family puts their name in a hat and two names are picked. The first person selected has to get pied in the face...and the second name is the one who gets to do it. It's strange, right? I don't even remember how the tradition started, but I do know that I'm riding a 10-year "No Pie" streak, so I'm doing pretty well.
Even famous families have strange traditions around the holidays, and Billie Lourd shared hers while on The Late Late Show With James Corden. Lourd, who is the daughter of the late Carrie Fisher and granddaughter of the late Debbie Reynolds, admitted that their family tradition was interesting: lying.
The American Horror Story actress started of by admitting that she shouldn't be allowed near the kitchen on Thanksgiving.
"Cooking is a dangerous thing for me, I'm pretty inept in the kitchen," Lourd said. "It's kind of scary, it's a dangerous time."
But that doesn't mean Lourd doesn't try and pretend the food she brings to family dinner isn't home cooked. In fact, it's exactly what her grandmother did.
"So, what I do is lie, I bring something from a great restaurant and I put it in a sad little box and pretend like I did it. My grandma used to do it."
Lourd remembered when she and her dad caught Reynolds trying to fool the family, even after distinctly saying she was cooking for everyone.
"She did it really poorly. One year, she decided she was going to make everything and she said she was going to make everything," she recalled. "[She] put [the food] out. My dad and I were serving the food on the plates and we were like, "˜This isn't looking great.' And we checked under [the table] and it's El Pollo Loco. At least put it in a different dish!"
Now that Reynolds has passed, Lourd still wants to carry on the family "tradition." But she puts way more effort into it than Reynolds did.
"So, I do better and put it in a sad Tupperware so it looks like I did it," she laughed.
Lourd tragically lost her mother and grandmother just a day apart in December of 2016. While this won't be the first Thanksgiving without them, it's not going to be any easier. Learning to cope with the loss was hard, but Lourd credits her role on American Horror Story for helping her work through it all.
"Honestly, it kind of saved my life," Lourd told Entertainment Tonight. "When Ryan offered me [the role] it was just a few months after my mom passed, and it honestly helped me process all of my emotions through these characters. Being able to cry for [my character] helped me cry for myself. And it's been really healing and cathartic in an amazing way. It is heavy. We spend, like, 14 hours a day crying, and sometimes I go home and I will cry in my car for no reason because it's like peeing. Once you break the seal, you can't stop."
