The nation will this week partake in a ritual unlike any other in the rest of the world. Americans of all persuasions, races, and creeds will gather with family around the table and give thanks, most of them to the Almighty, for the bounty they have received this year.
It’s easy to take Thanksgiving for granted. And yet it is something uniquely American, and truly a wonder. It is a holiday that confirms that we as a country are committed to gratitude and to recommitting ourselves annually to this national character trait.
It acts as some sort of baptismal sacrament. Immigrants take their first timid step toward Americanization when they start honoring this sacred holiday and learn to cook its dishes. And thereby, without being fully aware, they begin to incarnate the national spirit.
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In personal terms, a disposition to be grateful renders important benefits, reducing anxiety and depression, and making us better companions and better sleepers. This is so self-evident that it hardly requires research to substantiate it, but the evidence does exist.
In geopolitics, the thankful disposition draws a bright line between the United States and wretched states officially devoted to its opposite, ungratefulness. A commitment to gratitude may have been one of the things — right up there with love of liberty — that made America the historic sworn enemy of Marxism, whose guiding ideology, envy, is the wages of ingratitude.
Thanksgiving is unquestionably uniquely American. I have lived at least a year in seven countries, in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, many more if one counts shorter stays, and have never encountered anything like it anywhere else.
Yes, in East Asia, I experienced firsthand what the Koreans call the Chuseok festival, held on the 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, so from late September to early October, depending on the year. But it’s not dedicated to giving thanks, but rather to the full moon.
Canada, Liberia, and the Caribbean island nation of Grenada also have official Thanksgiving days, but they are derivatives of America’s.
Thanksgiving is not just uniquely tied to this country because it is reflective of the American national character. Its lineage is the thread of the national quilt.
Anyone who has watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and its companion, The Mayflower Voyagers, will know the essentials of how the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims and their Indian hosts in 1621 in the Plymouth Colony. Right there, Thanksgiving starts as a needed slap in the face to the “land acknowledgement” crowd.
(And yes, it might be better to read a book and learn history right and not from Peanuts, but don’t underestimate the value of popular culture in propagandizing the national spirit. When Charlie Brown exclaims at the Thanksgiving table, “We thank the Lord for a bountiful harvest,” Hollywood was telling generations of young Americans that it wasn’t just ok to be patriotic and faithful, but that it was normal and expected.)
Then, in one of its very first acts, the first Congress in 1789 requested that the newly elected President Washington proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving.
But it wasn’t until later, in the middle of the Civil War and in response to a persistent, decadeslong letter-writing campaign by editor and writer Sarah Josepha Hale, that Abraham Lincoln in 1863 proclaimed the last Thursday in November as our official day of Thanksgiving. Then, just as America was about to enter another war, Congress officially made it the fourth Thursday in 1941.
Thus, Congress and our most important leaders ratified an outlook that is the gift that keeps on giving.
Experiencing gratitude is “associated with greater longevity among older adults,” says a Harvard study from last year. According to the British Psychological Society, “around 18.5 per cent of individual differences in people’s happiness could be predicted by the amount of gratitude they feel.”
Saying thanks to your partner and meaning it also makes the institution of marriage stronger. A team at the University of Illinois found that “higher levels of perceived gratitude buffered against the stresses of both financial strain and ineffective arguing.” (One could ask, in marriage, is there any other type of arguing?)
Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley, a 2009 study found that “Gratitude was uniquely related to total sleep quality, subjective sleep quality, sleep latency, sleep duration, and daytime dysfunction.”
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Of course, Presidents Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt, and the various congresses in question — to say nothing of the Pilgrim fathers, Samoset, or Squanto — did not have any of these benefits in mind; they just wanted to thank the Lord. Maybe the unintended consequences are payback.
Of course, that is not going to help you deal with your aunt who voted for Kamala Harris and will show up dressed in a Handmaid’s Tale outfit. Just tell her that if President Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani can bury the hatchet, she can get along with others, too.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on e pluribus unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position of Heritage or its board of trustees.