some dazzling Thanksgiving ice sculptures: turkeys and more!

some of our Thanksgiving ice sculptures

Historically, Thanksgiving is one of the three big “brunch” days for ice sculptors. Easter and Mother’s Day are the other two. (Dad gets kinda screwed in the brunch rotation Father’s Day is usually a big nothing!) And then also, New Year’s Eve is traditionally another big day for ice.

In the past, we’d typically get a bunch of orders for turkey ice sculptures, kinda like the rabbits at Easter. But in recent years, we’ve wandered off into other designs, partly in an effort to stave off the boredom from cranking out the same sculpture over and over. (Remember, NO BORING ICE SCULPTURES!) This past year (meaning 2025, in case we’re way behind on updating again 😬), pumpkin pie was the new favorite design and Indian corn harvest was a close second! If you have any fun or unusual Thanksgiving ice sculpture designs you’d like to try at your event, please let us know. Carving up turkeys with chainsaws is fun, for a while… But variety is always appreciated!

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pumpkin pie!

is it just me, or does the pumpkin pie here look good enough to eat?! Maybe I just need a pumpkin pie fix. I’ll have to go into the deep freeze and see if there’s a still a frozen pie leftover under the broccoli 🥦🤢

Indian corn harvest

if pumpkin pie wasn’t so yummy 😋, this would be our absolute new favorite Thanksgiving ice sculpture! It has lots of fall colors and we’ve never seen or done a design quite like it before.

This turkey ice sculpture dispenses cold shrimp at a Thanksgiving buffet.

turkey shrimp luge

carving turkeys out of ice over and over again can get boring, but this one doesn’t count! That’s because it has room for delicious Louisiana shrimp on the inside. This sculpture was from a Thanksgiving extravaganza at one of our favorite restaurants, Red Fish Grill.

fruit and veggies flow out of a cornucopia ice sculpture

classic cornucopia

instead of a wicker cornucopia, we give you a giant ice one! It’s not quite as hollow and it’s a LOT heavier, but it’ll be okay 😜

cornucopia with logo

uh, this cornucopia doesn’t hold anything?! But it does have a great spot for a company logo, or maybe a simple message, like “Happy Thanksgiving.” (SO obvious 🙄)

large turkey ice sculpture by ice dragon ice sculptures

classic turkey

probably every pro ice sculptor in the country has sculpted a lot of ice turkeys. They’re a bit tricky since the turkey’s tail doesn’t fit well in an ice block. But we do a little ice surgery to give our turkeys a great big tail fan!

the Mayflower

got space at your event for a pretty big Thanksgiving ice sculpture? How about our frozen version of the Mayflower? We even did a little research, to make sure that it looks just like the classic ship, supposedly 🤔

turkey ice sculpture with green lighting at a country club

another turkey

did we mention that we’ve carved a lot turkeys for Thanksgiving? Oh, right, we did! Here’s another one, this time at a country club and inexplicably lit in green 🤷‍♂️

turkey on pumpkins

see, with THIS one, we changed things up a bit and put the turkey on top of a pumpkin or two. That makes for a smaller turkey, but one that sits up a little higher than the normal big fat turkey.

a snowfill engraved ice sculpture of the Mayflower with "Happy Thanksgiving" by ice dragon ice

engraved Mayflower

with our more standard Mayflower ice sculpture, we can’t sculpt the ropes, because they’d only last a few minutes and drive us crazy 🤪 But with this engraved version, the famous ship comes complete with ropes, riggings, and other details!

pilgrim Snoopy

we don’t normally make a lot of ice featuring famous cartoon characters, but this particular Thanksgiving ice sculpture request was tough to pass up! Pilgrim Snoopy and his toy musket remind us to go and watch the Peanuts Thanksgiving special, yet again 🙂

color turkey fan tail ice sculpture with "Happy Thanksgiving", in a hotel kitche

turkey tail fan

don’t really remember exactly where this idea came from, but it’s definitely an ice dragon original! And what’s more Thanksgiving-ish than a giant turkey tail? This one is sitting in a hotel kitchen, delivered a bit early and melting patiently before going back in the freezer 🥶

more stuff about our Thanksgiving ice sculptures!

This is a brand new page about our Thanksgiving ice sculptures, so it’s still up in the air as to what will go here. But we’ll go through the archives and see if we can remember an interesting story about one of our Thanksgiving ice sculptures.

Oh, wait! I’ve got one. Where do you think is the most interesting place we’ve ever had a Thanksgiving ice sculpture? You’ll NEVER guess!

Believe it or not, it was in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico! See, what happens is, out on the oil platforms, they work basically all the time, right through the holidays. They don’t take a break to come back and go to Thanksgiving dinner 🙁

However, instead, the oil companies bring the holidays to them, sort of. The food services out on the platforms put on special holiday dinners for the workers and a couple of times, they ordered ice sculptures from us for those special dinners.

Understandably, it’s kinda tough to deliver to an oil platform. We don’t have a delivery boat. (A delivery helicopter is on the wish list, but…🤷‍♂️) However, the oil companies of course have boats! So we went down to Port Fourchon and we packed up our ice into a giant insulated container with dry ice and the boat headed out on a seven hour trip to the platform. As far as we know, our Thanksgiving ice sculpture out on the Gulf went great because they ordered more for Christmas 😊

In the years since, we’ve done lots of ice sculpting out on the open seas, but that’s another story for another time!

Oh, if you didn’t see the links up above, also check out our Easter and Mother’s Day sculpture galleries. And if you’re not from the U.S. and have no idea about what this “Thanksgiving” is, check out a bit of Thanksgiving history.