Ray Isle (@islewine on Twitter) is Food & Wine's executive wine editor. We trust his every cork pop and decant – and the man can sniff out a bargain to boot. Take it away, Ray.

Every year there are endless wine columns about what to pair with a holiday meal. They take three main forms: What to pair with turkey; what to pair with everything else, since turkey has no taste; and “This year, be off-the-wall and try X,” X being anything from Beaujolais to Riesling to Maine blueberry wine.

Enough is enough. This holiday season, here’s an idea. Don’t worry about pairing a specific wine with your meal. Instead, since the holidays are all about giving thanks (at least that’s the idea, right?), why not extend that sentiment a little and pour a wine that’s about giving back?

There are a growing number of charity-friendly wines out there, and here are a few that would be particularly good with a special holiday dinner - or really, with any meal at all.
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Before you tuck in to your gravy-drenched, slow-roasted turkey this Thanksgiving, you might want to give thanks that you’re not circling above the earth at 17,500 miles per hour. Forget for a moment that you probably couldn’t even keep the food down in microgravity – would you be willing to trade those creamy mashed potatoes or Grandma’s green been casserole for something freeze-dried and wrapped in plastic?

For six astronauts currently working more than 200 miles above the surface of the earth, that choice is easy, as freeze-dried, irradiated and thermostablized food items are their only options. Luckily for them, food scientist Vickie Kloeris and her team at NASA have developed shelf-stable Thanksgiving meals to celebrate the holiday on the International Space Station. First though, they had to figure out a way to make the food taste good in space.

“One of our biggest challenges is that crew members in orbit do report that they feel like their taste buds are somewhat dulled,” Kloeris told CNN from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
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upwave is Turner Broadcasting's new lifestyle brand designed to entertain the health into you! Visit upwave.com for more information and follow upwave on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram (@upwave). Keri Glassman MS, RD, CDN is a nationally recognized nutrition expert and published author.

Many people can relate to the nostalgia of Thanksgiving. There is something so wonderful and comforting about having the same meal, in the same home, at the same table, off of the same plates, year after year. If you are a die-hard sentimentalist, it is really challenging to have even the smallest disruption to the celebration.

If, on the other hand, you are ready to make your Thanksgiving a little more contemporary and a little more modern, I have recommendations to honor your grandmother’s Thanksgiving, but with a healthy twist.

Keep the meal, keep the home, keep the plates, keep the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, football games and family gathering, but make some delicious shifts and you’ll hardly miss a thing.
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In case you've been living under Plymouth Rock, Thanksgivukkah, the hybrid word du jour references the unlikely convergence of the Thanksgiving and Hanukkah holidays.

Such a calendar occurrence won't happen again for approximately 70,000 years, so professional and home cooks alike have crossbred the respective culinary traditions with the fervor of 1,000 turduckens.

One such mash-up from Tori Avey, who blogs as The Shiksa in the Kitchen,  is a savory challah stuffing recipe - and for that, we're thankful.
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