Thanksgiving is America

Over the years I have been told by a great number of expats that while the Fourth of July is very important, Thanksgiving is truly the holiday that is most evocative of home. Thus, I wrote a thing…

As with all national myths and as its Civil War origins imply, Thanksgiving has its demographic dissidents and its discontents. For obvious reasons the celebration of Thanksgiving is deeply complex in Native American communities, treated by some as a Day of Mourning. In the years after the Civil War Thanksgiving was not widely celebrated in the South, as the holiday seemed representative of the North’s arrogance in victory. Over time, however, the South embraced Thanksgiving as vigorously as anywhere, developing traditions that overlap with the traditional New England holiday but also expand through foods and cultural practices more common in the Sunbelt.

For a variety of reasons Thanksgiving was slow to catch on among Black Americans, but it now has its own community traditions and expectations. In cities, detached cosmopolitans increasingly celebrate Friendsgiving, an interpretation of the holiday that de-emphasizes family in favor of voluntary association. And that, after all, is America; any polyglot society will necessarily demand different interpretations of communal holidays, and Thanksgiving is big enough to fit all of those traditions in. 

Thanksgiving is naturally fractious, on the macro side in terms of its position in competing narratives of what it means to be an American, and on the micro side in the way that it brings families (of every sort) uneasily together for a few hours of real, uncomfortable conversation. Indeed, Thanksgiving even engenders murder on the highways, the most quintessentially American experience that one could hope for.