Dear Thanksgiving
We will keep fighting for you; you're needed now more than ever
Been thinking deeply about tomorrow. About Thanksgiving. How it so aptly symbolizes an eternal connection to kin and place and God. How it stands out as one of the last bastions of light calling us back to that in an age of, well, the complete opposite. So I figured I should just write to you.
Dear Thanksgiving,
You first showed your true colors when I was a kid sitting on the carpet at my great-grandmother’s house (a descendent herself of your immortal inception depicted above) in upstate New York. Dozens of relatives crammed into those little rooms. The smell of food, the roar of conversation, family everywhere. Those gatherings feel almost eternal in my memory, like they had always been there and always would be. I loved you.
Then they started to fade. People moved, died, drifted, divorced. The big gatherings shrank, then disappeared. Was that natural? Was it for a lack of kids born into subsequent generations? I have an idea, but it’s hard to be certain, I was just a child. For a long stretch, you were mostly a blur on the calendar. I lost you.
Then, as an adult, you found me again in uniform.
Back then you meant a four-day pass, a break in the tempo, early release on Wednesday, dead space on Monday and Tuesday. PT, a couple briefings, everyone half-packed in their heads already. The machine loosening its grip just a little.
I thought that was why I loved you.
Now I’m a husband and a father, and I see it clearer. What I loved was not the pass. It was the pattern you kept showing me, even when I didn’t have language for it.
People going home. Tables filling up. Grandparents, cousins, strays who had nowhere else to go. Real food. Real time. The noise of too many people in too small a house. The feeling that, for once, we were pointed toward something that made sense.
We call you “Thanksgiving,” but if we’re honest, we’ve tried to rip the center out. Gratitude with no object. “So thankful” with no One to thank. Nice feelings floating in the air so nobody has to say the word “God.”
I can’t do that anymore.
Gratitude has a name. It has scars. It hung on a cross. When we bow our heads at the table, we are not talking to the universe. We are talking to the Giver of the turkey and the roof and the old woman at the end of the table who still prays for all of us by name.
That is why you still land with such force, even in a tired country. You line up with how God actually made us to live.
Not as isolated units in separate apartments. Not as “high achievers” chasing careers across three time zones. As households. As kin. As people who gather, eat, and give thanks together.
For one day, the norm is multigenerational again. Three, sometimes four layers of a family tree under one roof. Babies on hips, teens in the corner, uncles telling stories everyone’s already heard. Women running the kitchen like a command center. A father at the head of the table with a knife in his hand and a blessing on his lips.
This is how people lived for most of history. Not once a year. Every week. The Church, when it’s sane, still smells like that life. Families gathered. Tables central. Feasts tied to worship.
Which is exactly why the machine circles you like prey.
It drags Black Friday up into Thursday. It stretches “holiday hours” into “we’re open all day.” It pulls parents off the couch and into overnight shifts because some CEO wants a Q4 bump. It wraps your quiet sanity in a cocoon of “limited time offers” and screen ads.
Even the football is different now. I like the game playing in the background after dinner. I like half-sleeping in a chair with a plate of leftovers. But when the whole weekend turns into content, you can feel the shift. From feast to programming. From holy day to brand opportunity.
And honestly, the machine has come for the kitchen too.
There’s a world of difference between a meal your people spent two days cooking and a meal you mostly assembled from plastic clamshells. One carries memory and skill and sacrifice. The other carries a barcode.
I’m not throwing stones at the exhausted mom who grabbed store-bought pies because she’s drowning. I get it. But as a pattern, it tells the same story as everything else. You don’t have time to build anything at home. Let us sell it back to you.
Yet every year you refuse to completely die.
There are still houses where the turkey gets brined in a cooler on the porch. Where someone is up late making rolls from scratch. Where kids get pulled into peeling potatoes and snapping green beans and licking batter off the spoon. Those homes feel different. They hum.
You are smaller now. More fragile. There are empty seats that still hurt. There are families that used to gather and now don’t. There are people who eat you alone in front of a TV. There are marriages that blew apart and kids who bounce between houses.
I see all of that. I feel it too, for I’ve known it personally.
But I also see what you prove, year after year, even in the ruins.
You prove that the nuclear family, by itself, is not enough. That we are meant to be part of a chain, not just a pair. That children are supposed to know cousins and grandparents, not just classmates. That a life of endless individual choice is thinner than one ordinary day with people who belong to you.
You prove that we don’t actually want endless efficiency. We want a table. We want stories. We want the same prayer said by the same grandfather in the same cracked voice. And when we lose him, we want to take his seat and keep the legacy humming.
You prove that the most “advanced” society on earth still can’t fully stamp out the ache for home.
So here is where my relationship with you has changed.
I used to see you as a sweet exception. A nice break from “real life” that we squeeze in between commutes and credit card payments.
Now I see you as a signal. A flare going up once a year to remind us, “This is closer to real life than what you go back to on Monday.”
You are not the anomaly. The Monday after you is the anomaly.
So I want to treat you differently.
I want to stand at the head of the table and say God’s name out loud. I want my kids to hear that this food came from somewhere, and Someone, long before it came from the oven. I want them to see work and joy wrapped together in the kitchen. I want them to grow up thinking a packed table is normal, not exotic.
And then, when the dishes are stacked and the house is wrecked and the kids are sticky with pie, I want to steal pieces of you and smuggle them into the rest of the year.
A standing Sunday dinner after Mass. A random Wednesday soup night where neighbors drop by. Phones an afterthought. Board games and storytellings instead of Netflix. More meals cooked in our own pots, with our own hands, on our own land.
Less “holiday season” as an annual spectacle. More holy days, small and regular, with the same faces around the same table in the same house.
You can’t fix everything, I know that. You won’t resurrect every dead marriage or heal every fracture. But you can remind fathers what it feels like to be at the head of the table on purpose. You can remind mothers that their labor in the kitchen is not “unpaid” but priceless. You can remind children that they come from somewhere, and that the old people in the corner are not obstacles but roots.
So, Thanksgiving, here is my promise.
I will keep fighting for you. Not as a brand, not as a travel day, but as a pattern. I will push back against the little ways the machine tries to hollow you out. I will say no when to the shifts and the sales that would steal you from my kids. I will light the hearth ablaze, cook real food, invite real people, and speak real thanks to a real God.
And then I will try, clumsily, to live like you were telling the truth about what life is for.
A table. A family. A community. A God who gives.
That is what you are at your best.
I plan to soak up every bit of it.
Love,
A dad at the head of the table
Happy Thanksgiving everyone and God Bless!
-Greg @ The Dissident Dad