Happy to oblige. At Christmas Americans do eat turkey, generally; that's the classic meat dish for the day. It's accompanied by cranberry relish, usually out of a can, but cooks who are ambitious make their own; the National Public Radio website has one that's pretty popular with liberals. I think cranberries are vile, no matter how much sugar you use, so I don't mess with them.
We also eat "stuffing", and I think that the sites for epicurious, Gourmet magazine, and Martha Stewart Living can probably give various upscale recipes for both of those. When I used to serve turkey I just opened a can of relish and bought a couple of boxes of Mrs. Cubbison's Stuffing Mix. I am a downscale, unambitious cook who feels that a major gourmet meal involving various fancy courses on a day after I've been working flat out is a bit much to expect.
I had a big family in state at one point, and I also served ham. Ham isn't all that unusual at Christmas; it is traditionally made (or used to be) with a sauce involving Coca-Cola and decorated with slices of canned pineapple fastened to it with cloves. Isn't that hysterical? I just checked, and Nigella Lawson's website has a recipe, though I don't think she goes whole hog on the pineapple slices (har har). I have begun to question her sanity. I just go to the Honeybaked Ham store.
Many Americans traditionally have a couple of hot vegetable dishes; in my youth one always was canned green beans topped with a can of undiluted Campbell's mushroom soup, reheated. (It is truly unthinkably awful. Some lucky people get green beans, slivered almonds, and baby onions.) The other was some version of yams, heavily sweetened; the classic is a sort of cooked, mashed yam dish topped by marshmallows, put under a broiler so the marshmallows start to melt and get a little brown. I admit to loving this, but in the years before microwaves all of this meant that a cooked turkey would sit around for a while--nothing wrong with that--while these dishes heated up.
Some form of roll is standard; the classic of my youth for most people was reheated store-bought Parker House rolls, and if your student looks up an image of that he or she will be able to see why the most childish among us make jokes about buttocks in their honor. I bake yeast rolls for such occasions, but I think that many home cooks don't learn that at their mamas' knees. I learned that, as did my brother. I also learned how to wield a can opener.
In pre-microwave years all that was happening in the oven while you were making gravy on the stovetop. My father made "Red-eye gravy; he was from the South, where it's standard. Gravy comes in cans too.
There's usually a green salad which no one eats, at least in my family.
My mother, half-Welsh, always served mince pies with a lattice top as well as pumpkin pie, but pumpkin pie is the standard dessert for most people, I think. A mince pie here is made in a full-sized pie dish, rather than those cute little individual pies made in the UK. Pumpkin pie doesn't have a pastry top. My family likes apple pie and pumpkin pie, so that's what they get. I took a mince pie to a friend's Thanksgiving dinner a couple of years ago and noticed that I was the only one to eat it, despite the fact that the crust was, for once, amazing. Wimps. Apple and pumpkin pie often come out of the frozen section of the market and are popped into the oven the day before Christmas. Pumpkin pie is usually served with whipped cream or a substitute called "Cool Whip." Whipped cream can come in a can with a nozzle, and every kid in America has wanted to shoot whipped cream at the whole family and not been allowed to.
I don't think Americans taste buds are attuned to Christmas pudding and mince pie, so they don't appear, generally. My mother grew up in an area where a lot of Welsh settled, and claimed that in the years before fruit trees grew people (brace yourself) made "carrot pudding" instead. This involves grated carrots in place of the ingredients that normally would come from fruit trees, and otherwise it is very much like plum pudding in texture, though it's a much lighter color. It wasn't ever lit, though; these Welsh were teetotal, and the sauce was made from rum flavoring. It wasn't very good, frankly. The trees have been up for some 150 years, but my mother's family stuck with carrot pudding.
Beforehand, while everybody's starving, people serve sliced carrots, celery, store-bought pickled gherkins--dill, sweet and "bread and butter" were favorites in my childhood--and canned black olives. If you are a juvenile delinquent you teach your brother's kids to stick olives on all of their fingers. Okay, I was a juvenile delinquent well into my twenties. My mother yelled down the table to tell my brother to make me stop, and he stuck carrot pieces in his nostrils in response. I love my brother.
The thing is, all of this--barring the almonds, celery, carrots, and the turkey, if it's tough--is food that you can eat without putting your dentures in. It's mushy, in short. This doesn't have much appeal for me.
I don't much like a number of these things, and last year it occurred to me that I could cook whatever I darn well pleased. So we had a beef roast and a pan of Yorkshire pudding. (Mother wasn't from Yorkshire, but she made that now and again, and I love it. It turns out that my family does too.) I think I served yams mashed with chopped dates, apple pie, and something called Huguenot pudding. There were no objections, and no one said "Hey, where's that green bean and mushroom soup goop that Aunt Madge used to make??" I think we'll probably have about the same this year.
I hope that helps. There's a well known Norman Rockwell painting that gives a sense of the emotions that are supposed to prevail at Thanksgiving, and often they do.
http://cf.foodista.com/content/fp/vozxmkygy7t4flyv.jpg
The table would look similar at Christmas, though the tablecloth might have red and green printed on it or embroidered on it. No Christmas crackers or silly hats, alas.
Lol. 
