With Thanksgiving just a little more than three weeks away, start considering how you can engage your audience with stories, scavenger hunts and more.

Here are a few ideas to get you going:

1. How much will Thanksgiving dinner cost you?

The American Farm Bureau Federation will soon put out its annual survey on how much — on average — it will cost this year to put a Thanksgiving meal on the table. This is a fun story to localize, talking with locals — and utilizing social media for reaction — on how their budget compares. 

If you’re in a state that produces ingredient or main courses for the holiday, take a look at the cost to produce those. Have they gone up, should consumers expert to pay more and why?

2. There are how many calories in that?

This chart in this post shows you that you could actually consume 3,000 calories at Thanksgiving dinner. Ouch.  So that is just an interesting thing to post. But what about looking to see if you have an Overeaters Anonymous group in your community. It could be a neat feature on the organization, while looking at how to help your audience create controls during the holidays with tips.

3. A little help for parents 

Two ideas for parents and Thanksgiving. The first is to focus on how to make things normal for your kids when there is so much craziness around them: Sugary foods, family they don’t normally see and travel. Talk to an expert to help parents guide their family through these chaotic times.

The second idea has to do with parents dealing with their college kid coming back for the first time or maybe the last time, if they are a senior in college. How do you bring kids back into the house and if this may be their last college Thanksgiving meal at home, how do you make it a special one?

Both of these stories are perfect for lists. Here’s an example from The Huffington Post.

4. Take kids on a scavenger hunt

Create a scavenger hunt that parents can clip out or print out on T-Day. The idea is to ask kids to find a certain number of items in the newspaper — or the website — on Thanksgiving. Things like food you’d like to eat or the word “thanks.”

What about a print out of a Thanksgiving coloring exercise for your kids. Ask readers to post their finished product on your social media page.

While this is not a Thanksgiving coloring contest, it does show you how to do a coloring contest, via a TV station website.