Outside the Beltway

Thanksgiving: The Most American Holiday

Thanksgiving is a giant contradiction, just like America

Michael Bailey · Wednesday, November 26, 2025 · 9 comments

Thanksgiving invites us to reflect with moral seriousness upon that for which we have to be grateful, but it also has more than its share of kitsch, silliness, and excess. It means sharing a table with loved ones, often extending an invitation to those without a Thanksgiving home, but it also includes Snoopy at the Macy’s parade and turkey outfits and football and gelatinous cranberry plopped from a can and the sudden mood shift from a spirit of sharing to unbridled consumer excess. In other words, it’s a giant contradiction, just like America.

You may or may not enjoy Thanksgiving, but you can’t say it’s not American through and through. And in this precise holiday spirit of sincerity but also a little playfulness, here I want to suggest that Thanksgiving is the most American of all holidays.

Thanksgiving and our Multiple American Foundings

To make such a claim, we have to ask a deeper question: what is America? Our national identity has always been understood through reference not merely to geography or great military victories or architectural wonders but to foundational and aspirational ideas. Our deepest narrative is rooted less in the battles of Lexington and Concord and the beaches of Normandy than in the principles of self-government, rights, liberty, and the belief that citizens should rule themselves under limited and constitutional power.

Constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman has argued that the United States has not had just one founding, but three—or, more accurately, one founding and two “refoundings.” He identifies:

• The First Founding – the drafting and ratification of the Constitution and subsequent Bill of Rights (1787–1791).
• The Second Founding – the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments of the 1860s.
• The Third Founding – the institutional transformation of the New Deal (along with the attitudinal shifts about government that went with it) in the 1930s.

But if we broaden our view, the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville saw an even earlier foundational moment. Writing in the 1830s, he argued that the nation’s deepest political character was formed not in Philadelphia, but in the hamlets and townships of Massachusetts Bay Colony and broader New England. There he identified a distinctly American ethos rooted in the Puritan experience: religiosity, moral purposefulness, and a congregation-based style of democratic decision-making.

If we add Tocqueville’s observation to Ackerman’s, we arrive at four American foundings or refoundings. And here we find something worth noting: Thanksgiving touches, or is in some important detail associated with, all four of these American Foundings. No other holiday reflects each phase of American political development in quite the same way.

Thanksgiving and the Pilgrim Founding

The familiar 1621 event—what we now call the First Thanksgiving, though there were other earlier autumnal celebrations both in Europe and among the Indigenous peoples of North America—was a three-day harvest festival shared between the Pilgrim settlers and the Wampanoag. The Pilgrim settlement had survived the previous harsh winter and the long pre-harvest seasons of the current year in significant part due to the Wampanoag’s guidance in cultivating corn and instructing them how to live from the land. We may think of the Pilgrims as a buttoned-up bunch, but the few accounts we have of the moment suggest the three-day gathering was festive rather than solemn. There were games, friendly competitions, and displays of skill that characterized a spirit of joy and relief instead of formal religious ceremony. Even looking through the fog that shrouds that time in myth, there is no doubt that the meals they enjoyed truly were multicultural, rooted in Indigenous crops and New England wildlife as well as Pilgrim sensibilities.

Both the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag valued gratitude as a moral virtue, and the feast was a celebration of survival, mutual assistance, and shared humanity. In a sense, Thanksgiving began as a national potluck, a moment when different communities brought what they had not just to eat together but to acknowledge their interdependence.

Thanksgiving and the Constitutional Founding

After the Constitution was drafted and the new federal government was organized, Congress asked President George Washington to proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving. Washington’s proclamation of October 3, 1789 became the first Thanksgiving consciously observed as a civic event of the United States. In his proclamation, Washington emphasized gratitude to God—especially for the occasion to establish a constitutional system in peace and upon reflection—as well as a call for national moral reflection, both for gratitude and for repentance for any wrongdoing that the people or the nation had committed.

Washington believed that a free people must be capable of humility. To give thanks, a nation must acknowledge its own limits, its sins, its dependence upon not only God but also mutual aid, and its need for forgiveness. In that way, Thanksgiving became not just a celebration but a practice of self-examination. I believe this trait of humility remains familiar today whenever families go around the table saying what they are thankful for.

Thanksgiving and the Civil War Refounding

Abraham Lincoln issued the proclamation that turned Thanksgiving into an annual national holiday. He did so on October 3, 1863, four months after fortune began favoring the Union due to Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, at the height of the Civil War.

Where Washington issued his proclamation after triumph, Lincoln issued his in catastrophe. Interestingly, however, he too called for much the same as Washington. His proclamation calls on the nation to recognize their blessings and “the gracious gifts of the Most High God,” even in wartime. He also soberly acknowledged that the nation might be suffering for its collective sins. And he called for humility, mercy, unity, and responsibility.

Like Washington, Lincoln wanted Thanksgiving to be a moment of self-reflection. But it was also a call toward eventual reconciliation, a symbolic family meal for a nation badly broken apart.

Despite their different contexts, Washington’s and Lincoln’s proclamations are strikingly similar. Both express gratitude for blessings. Both ask Americans to be humble rather than arrogant. Both place faith in the capacity of the American people to govern themselves. Thanksgiving thus reminds us that a republic requires humility.

Thanksgiving and the New Deal Refounding

The role of Thanksgiving in the New Deal era shows another American characteristic: the blending of tradition with commercial practicality and the celebration of the American sport of football.

In 1939, Thanksgiving fell very late in November. Wanting to lengthen the holiday shopping season during the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt announced in August of that year that he was using his “moral authority” to invite states to move Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of November. Some states accommodated FDR’s request; others didn’t. Americans pretty much went nuts in response. Travel plans had been set, schools were scheduled, and, perhaps most importantly, football games had already been arranged. The new FDR holiday time was mockingly called “Franksgiving.”

Even FDR could not win against the football schedule. Congress intervened in 1941 to set things straight, establishing by law the fourth Thursday in November as the permanent national holiday. It was also when the country consistently designated the holiday Thanksgiving Day.

Thanksgiving as a Reflection of American Character

Even if we set aside all of the multiple American Foundings business, Thanksgiving just feels distinctively American. It reflects many of our national characteristics. It captures our quirks, our contradictions, our aspirations, and our habits. Here, I will name just a few.

America likes her fun, and Thanksgiving is fun

From the start, the holiday was not a time of fasting but of feasting, laughter, relief, and joy. The modern celebration still reflects that spirit: we eat, we joke about overeating, we watch parades, and we enjoy being together because life is so very hard and moments of joy are precious.

Thanksgiving is not a long solemn sermon; it is a potluck.

Thanksgiving is a melting-pot holiday 

The first meal was overwhelmingly Indigenous in character. We don’t have great certainty of everything that was served, but we do know that the Wampanoag brought five deer to the festivity for consumption. We also know that corn, fish, squash, pumpkins, nuts, venison, berries, and other wild game and fowl often associated with that first feast were consistent with the diet of the Wampanoag.

Moreover, as we’ve already noted, Thanksgiving, like America itself, involved multiple layers of historical traditions. Thanksgiving not only reflects seventeenth-century Pilgrim and Wampanoag sensibilities, it also is associated with eighteenth-century civic patriotism, nineteenth-century national reconciliation, and twentieth-century commercial spectacle.

It’s definitely a melting-pot holiday.

It is about football and commerce, unapologetically

Only in the United States would a president move a national holiday to boost retail spending and the public respond by protesting, essentially, “You can’t move it—there’s football!”

A couple of days ago, I asked my students what—beyond the four Fs of Family, Friends, Food, and Football—they consider to be an essential part of their Thanksgiving holidays. Answers varied (my favorite was one student and her mom reading side-by-side on a couch), but the most common response was shopping. That included online shopping and brick-and-mortar store shopping. It’s part of who we are, and I’m okay with it. I don’t actually partake in Black Friday shopping, but it’s just who we are. Commercialism has its crass and vulgar aspects, but it can also be communal and other-regarding, and part of the way we sharpen and express our personal identities is through our purchases. In any case, it’s not going away and it’s very much part of Thanksgiving. And why not? It’s very American.

The combination of capitalism and football may not be our noblest trait, but it is certainly one of the most recognizable. As George Will once quipped, football is “violence punctuated by committee meetings,” and in that sense it is very American.

Thanksgiving is both tradition and reinvention

Like people everywhere, Americans love tradition. Americans also love to add new wrinkles to their traditions, and every generation seems to change the old standbys. Thanksgiving is no different. New recipes appear every year. Since my family moved to the South, we’ve added pecan pie and macaroni and cheese to our meal—and, trust me, there’s no going back. We have friends who deep-fry their turkeys, and apparently there are those who eat Tofurkey or Turducken, though I wonder if those are more myth than reality.

And then there is my favorite Thanksgiving innovation: Friendsgiving. Friendsgiving reflects how families evolve, and it reflects how in today’s world quite often our most valued relationships are those that are chosen, not just the ones we’re born into. It also reflects a spirit of inclusion that is fitting for this holiday. If you don’t have family nearby, make your own temporary Thanksgiving family!

Casual and chaotically democratic

Thanksgiving is a big ol’ feast of good intentions, with too many dishes, and a dash of chaos thrown in. We may want it to look like Norman Rockwell, but as often as not it looks more Picasso or even, when things go really off the rails, like Jackson Pollock. Sometimes political arguments break out around the table. Nearly always, with so many dishes, something gets burned or is undercooked. Grandpa (or Dad) falls asleep on the couch. And later in conversation we look down only to notice a big gravy stain on our shirt. And then there’s just the clean-up.  Thanksgiving is a mess. 

It is not aristocratic, and neither are we. It feels democratic: everyone brings something, and no one fully controls how it turns out.

Both public and private

American culture constantly balances civic identity with individual privacy. Thanksgiving mirrors that balance. Less public than the Fourth of July but more civic than Christmas, it includes parades, presidential proclamations, and football, all of which are public. Arguably, however, its deepest meaning happens around the table, among people who know and care about one another. It captures an oxymoronic phrase we use to describe ourselves: private citizens.

Thanksgiving is Aspirational

Thanksgiving is not only about who Americans are; it is also about who we hope to become. Patriotism, at its best, is not the denial of flaws, but the aspiration to rise above them.

Some holidays leave people out. Frederick Douglass famously asked, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” For many, independence celebrations can feel hollow or jingoistic and exclusionary. Unlike holidays tied to military service, religion, or romantic relationships, Thanksgiving is meant for everyone. If someone has nowhere to go, the expectation—at least ideally—is that another chair should be pulled up and another leaf placed in the table.

We can debate how inclusive the United States is. The short answer is for 2025 is: more inclusive than at our worst, less inclusive than at our best. As Lincoln reminded us many years ago, we face “unfinished business” in becoming who we claim to be. I believe we’re in a bad way in the United States, but that doesn’t mean we cannot take steps forward out of our regrettable place. 

In 1863, Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving proclamation on October 3. The holiday would fall on November 26. Exactly one week before that, on November 19, Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. It is not difficult for me to imagine that the Thanksgiving holiday (at least as Lincoln conceived it) and the Gettysburg Address are connected as part of a larger project: both gestures remind us to look back at our ideals and to move forward in a spirit of rededication.

In that great Address, Lincoln avoided naming leaders, sides, or political systems. It was, as Garry Wills has pointed out, remarkably abstract. Lincoln spoke of our shared humanity and of “a government of, by, and for the people.” The last word of the address is “earth,” a fitting reminder that we all share the same home.

Thanksgiving, at its best, reminds us that we may have differences, but we also have much in common. For one day, we should be able to share a table, just as Pilgrims and Wampanoag did centuries ago.

But to return to silliness once again, there is the turkey pardon. What a completely bizarre, hilarious, and uniquely American ritual. It’s kind of coo coo for Cocoa Puffs, frankly. Yet beneath the absurdity is the characteristically American belief that even in difficult times, tomorrow can be better.

Washington gave thanks after difficulty. Lincoln gave thanks during catastrophe. Both believed in gratitude, humility, responsibility, and faith in the unfinished American project. Lincoln wrote that the nation was undergoing a test. He believed, despite everything, that Americans would continue the work.

We live in dark times, and at times I fight against despair. But Thanksgiving reminds us that despair leads nowhere. If we abandon hope, nothing good follows. We have a civic—and for many of us, a religious—obligation to keep trying. The work is not done.

Conclusion

Is Thanksgiving truly the most American holiday? Who finally knows. There’s nothing much at stake in disagreement here. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, I think it’s pretty great.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!