Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, for all the coziness, homeyness, and gratitude it inspires and provides. But I’ve recently noticed a small thread of discontent or dissatisfaction in my heart regarding Thanksgiving, and I wanted to explore why. As I got curious about these feelings and paid attention to my inner monologue, I realized that I had defined “Thanksgiving traditions” in a particular way. When my husband and I were first married, we lived about two hours away from our family. So, we had about five years of driving back and forth on Thanksgiving and alternating between his extended family and mine. Then, we moved to Michigan in 2015, and in the decade since, every single Thanksgiving has been different.
I thought for Thanksgiving to be full of tradition, it meant gathering in the same house, eating the same food with the same people, year after year. Our holiday has never really looked like that. Does that make our Thanksgiving celebration somehow less than?
When someone says “Thanksgiving,” the image that comes to my mind is something that screams Nancy Meyers: lush and layered place settings, lit by candlelight, wooden dining chairs snug around the dining table. I imagine grocery store commercials in which cable-knit-clad aunts and uncles and grandparents carry stacks of pie through an open front door. Dinner rolls and mashed potatoes are practically overflowing from their crystal serving dishes. Everything is awash in golden light. My most ideal Thanksgiving self is something like Ina Garten, pulling things from the oven with ease, a glass of red wine in my hand. But it doesn’t usually look like that.
In 2019, my family came to Indiana, and we cooked in our rental kitchen. In 2020, I ordered our whole meal from Whole Foods and picked it up on Thanksgiving morning, face mask firmly in place. (And in the afternoon, the kids rode bikes around the neighborhood.) In other years, some of our siblings have sat around our table. Some years, it’s been friends who are also away from family.
Last year, with no family coming from out of town for the holiday and without the flexibility to travel ourselves, we decided to invite anyone else who didn’t have plans. My sister had a roommate from Taiwan, experiencing her first American Thanksgiving, who joined us, as did one of my husband’s international graduate students, and a dear friend from Venezuela. The six adults and three kids crammed in around our dining table, and it was really wonderful… even though it was, perhaps, nontraditional.
This year will be different yet again, because my parents and youngest sister moved to Indianapolis this summer, and my sister-in-law and her family moved from Florida to Michigan. (We’re slowly trying to get all our family to move to the Midwest, but that’s a topic for another day.) So, this may be the most “traditional” Thanksgiving we’ve had in years, with card tables and folding chairs pulled out to make room for as much family as possible around the table.
But now that I’ve written it out here, I have to confess that it doesn’t feel so different after all.
There is an iconic Normal Rockwell painting that we often see this time of year. In the photo, an apron-clad white matriarch holds an absolutely enormous turkey on a silver platter, setting it down in the center of the dinner table. Her smiling family sits all around, admiring her work and carrying on joyful conversations. Of course, it’s a white-washed, idealized portrayal. And the name of the painting is, “Freedom from Want.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, as our government is taking away SNAP benefits, cancelling food pantry deliveries, and generally making it much more difficult for anyone to experience that freedom. I want to be clear how truly grateful I am for the Thanksgivings I’ve experienced–where food, shelter, and care were abundant. So many people in our country are struggling to pull together a normal weekday dinner, let alone a holiday feast. What does it mean to experience freedom from want?
This Thanksgiving, I want to think less about what I do and more about how I’d like to feel.
Because though we’ve done something a little different every year on Thanksgiving, the vibe has been the same: cozy, slow, present, joyful. There has always been the Macy’s parade on television, delicious food to eat, and probably some time for pulling Christmas decorations out of the basement. And we’ve always tried to make space for anyone who wants to join us.
And ultimately, these are the things I’m most grateful for in life: time and the presence of loved ones, whether biological family or found-family.
Thanksgiving may look different each year, but the tradition of time and presence is the same.
