Thanksgiving 2025: The Mirror of American Values

1 • It’s not really religious.

Despite the language of “blessings” and “grace,” Thanksgiving is America’s most secular holy day — a civic ritual, not a church one. God is often thanked, but rarely worshipped.

2 • The “first Thanksgiving” wasn’t the first.

Other thanksgivings were celebrated decades earlier by Spaniards in Florida and settlers in Virginia. The famous 1621 feast in Plymouth became “the first” only later, when New England historians needed a founding myth that was Anglo-Protestant, not Catholic or Southern.

3 • It’s a unifying holiday invented in wartime.

Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving national in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, to remind Americans of their shared destiny. The Pilgrim story was a convenient parable of cooperation and faith in a divided nation.

4 • It’s also an economic machine.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to move it earlier in 1939 to lengthen the Christmas shopping season, half the country rebelled. Commerce and tradition collided — and both won.

5 • It’s America’s biggest travel event, not its most spiritual one.

For many, it’s about mileage, not meaning. Gratitude often takes second place to logistics.

Thanksgiving is, paradoxically, both secular and quasi-sacred. There’s usually a prayer before the meal, brief and inclusive — a whisper of faith in a country that takes belief seriously. It’s a day when saints and sinners of the same family break bread together, say grace and drink too much wine. That, too, is very American: pragmatic spirituality.

At its best, Thanksgiving is joyful. Kitchens hum with laughter & excitement, children decorate tables with paper turkeys, and old family stories are rehashed like comfort food. At the dinner table — everyone contributes, everyone speaks, everyone eats too much. The day celebrates abundance and family, two ideals Americans hold dear.

But, like so much in American culture, joy comes with performance. Gratitude becomes a duty, a posture. We are expected to feel thankful, even when we’re tired or angry. The ritual becomes an ordeal and demands harmony, which inevitably creates tension for some of us.

More than any other holiday, Thanksgiving is about return — to home, to origin, to the idea of family as the center of the American story. Airports overflow, highways crawl, and the national conversation turns to logistics: who’s cooking, who’s hosting, who’s still speaking to whom. It’s the busiest travel period of the year, a mass migration of affection and endurance.

There is tenderness in it — the yearning to reconnect, to measure the passage of time through familiar faces at the table. But there’s also fatigue, unspoken rivalries, and emotional déjà vu. Thanksgiving, more than Christmas, exposes the contradictions of the American family — the desire for closeness and the fear of it infringing on our individuality.

Few rituals capture American consistency like the Thanksgiving menu. The “sacred six” appear almost everywhere: roast turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. To change the formula feels nearly rebellious.

Yet the meal tells a subtler story — about regional diversity, migration, and adaptation:

• In New England, oyster stuffing nods to the sea.

• In the South Carolina Lowcountry, shrimp and grits, red rice with sausage, or oyster pie reflect Gullah-Geechee coastal heritage.

• In Black Southern homes, collard greens, cornbread dressing, and sweet potato pie are indispensable.

• Latino families add tamales or arroz con gandules; Asian-American families may include dumplings or noodles alongside the turkey.

Every variation is a small act of identity. The Thanksgiving table is a map of America — each dish a declaration of belonging.

Thanksgiving extends far beyond Thursday. Friday brings Black Friday, when gratitude yields to consumption. The nation that prayed for blessings the night before now lines up at dawn for the latest electronic devices and toys. It’s capitalism’s encore to communion — shopping as the great American bonding experience.

The weekend continues with football, leftovers, and online deals. Families collapse on sofas, caught between indigestion and affection. By Sunday, the great migration reverses: travelers return to their lives, weary but satisfied that the ritual has been performed. Thanksgiving is a “Mise en scene” of excess and repetition — oddly comforting, a little absurd, 100% American.

Beneath the warmth lies the part rarely acknowledged. The story of Pilgrims and Indians dining together in peace hides a history of colonization, disease, and displacement. Within a generation of the 1621 feast, the Wampanoag people — who had shared food and knowledge with the settlers — were devastated by war and epidemic. Their hospitality became the prologue to their erasure.

Many Native communities now mark the day as a National Day of Mourning, gathering in Plymouth to honor ancestors and challenge the sanitized version of history. They remind America that gratitude without truth is hollow.

Thanksgiving thus mirrors another American tendency: the ability to mythologize pain into progress, to replace complexity with comfort. It’s the national art of selective memory.

Commercial Religion

If religion once sanctified harvest festivals, commerce now fills the role. Thanksgiving celebrates abundance — of food, of love, of things. It is a ritual of consumption cloaked in the language of virtue. Airlines, grocery chains, and retailers are its new high priests; parades and football games its Mass.

Even gratitude itself is monetized — turned into slogans, hashtags, and advertising campaigns urging people to “shop with thanks.” America inevitably turns the sacred into a marketing opportunity.

And yet, it’s hard to condemn outright. The excess is part of the national DNA: optimism, appetite, belief in endless possibility. Thanksgiving doesn’t betray American values; it is those values — generosity and greed, sincerity and spectacle, faith and forgetfulness — all competing with one another for the spotlight on a single crowded stage.

Still, it would be unfair to ignore the joy. Thanksgiving brings real laughter, genuine connection, and moments of unfiltered warmth. It’s the holiday most Americans remember with sensory detail — the enveloping warmth of family and the fireside that softens the onset of winter, the smell of pie, the sound of football commentary, the stress of getting it all perfect, however complicated. In those moments, the country’s and family contradictions fall briefly silent.

Perhaps that’s why the holiday endures. It allows Americans to believe — even for a few hours — that gratitude can bridge rivalries, jealousies, hurt feelings and political differences, that the table can heal what divides. It’s a dream worth revisiting, even if it’s imperfect and illusory.

A Personal Distance

After decades abroad, Thanksgiving for me has become more symbol than celebration. I’m grateful for many things — friendship, good health, the calmer rhythm of life in France — but I no longer need a date to feel it.

When my friends in Lyon invite me to their expat feasts, I understand their longing to recreate home through ritual. They’re conjuring memory through food, comfort and repetition. But for me, the meaning has thinned with time. Distance has stripped away the sentimentality, leaving something clearer — a quieter kind of gratitude.

Thanksgiving is less a holiday than a mirror. It reflects the things Americans cherish — family, faith, abundance, optimism — and the things they struggle to face — history, excess, denial. It is both a sermon and a show, repentance and a blowout.

To understand Thanksgiving is to understand America itself: the desire to be thankful and self-indulgent at once. And to live abroad is to see that both impulses — the noble and the naïve — travel far.

As for me, I am content to let the day pass quietly. Gratitude, after all, doesn’t require turkey or a storyline. It requires only a moment’s honesty — and, perhaps thankfully for myself, an ocean’s distance.