That's one of our Thanksgiving staples - halve a butternut squash, roast the halves with butter and brown sugar, then scoop & mash.

Between the squash, sweet potatoes, and regular potatoes... there's a lot of mashed vegetable on our table lol.

There's no one standard dish but if you Google for Thanksgiving squash recipes you'll get a wide variety. Plus they're just so abundant in fall they're insanely cheap.

My family has always done squash on thanksgiving! We usually boil and then purée it with butter - similar to mashed potatoes but it tends to come out softer and wetter. Lately we’ve gotten more into roasted squash, but we’ll usually use something like delicata for that since butternut isn’t always great roasted.

Thanksgicing dishes/sides are HIGHLY regional. I'm originally from Texas and growing up, you wouldn't catch butternut squash on our Thanksgiving table. I'm also guessing you wouldn't catch rice dressing (rice, onion, bell pepper, celery, pork & chicken livers) on a table in the Northeast or probably further west than Houston because it's kind of a Cajun thing, and most non-Cajun families down here are probably going to have cornbread dressing vs white bread.

In the Midwest corn was a big part of Thanksgiving dishes as well as the classic sweet potato and green bean casserole and the dressing was typically white bread and sage based. Oh and there were a lot more roasted root vegetables than I was used to growing up in Texas where the sides more resembled a barbecue: deviled eggs, potato salad, broccoli cheese rice, mac and cheese, collards or turnip greens.

I had a lovely Thanksgiving in Cape Neddick, Maine last year and their Thanksgiving spread had some things I was unfamiliar with but were probably more "traditional" than what I typically ate. Stuffing/dressing was definitely bready sage but had some nutty things, maybe chestnuts. Lots of winter squash based dishes, and some other stuff that I'm definitely forgetting.

All in all, Thanksgiving is about celebrating the harvest/bounty of the year so while there are some things that are mainstreamed/nationwide, it also makes a lot of sense to have some regional variations and specialties.

We have butternut squash every Thanksgiving and the year I was struggling we received a box similar to this with the familiar butternut squash inside. Thankfully this year I was able to give rather than receive 🙏🏻💗