What Thanksgiving Traditions Mean Right Now: Holding Space for Both/And

The world feels fractured. People are examining traditions with new eyes, questioning what we've always done.

After 30 years teaching cooking to 50,000+ students, I've learned that the most important skill is holding complexity without collapsing into either/or thinking.

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Thanksgiving has complicated roots - and also, we're going to gather and feel grateful. We can hold both truths at once, and that's what makes us human.

The world feels fractured. I'm watching people examine traditions with new eyes, questioning what we've always done. And I keep thinking about what we lose when we decide something has to be all good or all bad.

Thanksgiving has roots that are painful and complicated and ugly in places. There is mythology that many of us were taught in school - the friendly feast, the happy pilgrims and Native Americans breaking bread together. That's not the entire story. The history that came after that moment - the violence and broken treaties and systematic destruction of Indigenous peoples- is real. That happened. That matters.

And also.

Also, I am going to gather around a table with people I love. I am going to cook food that takes hours to prepare. I'm going to feel grateful - not the Instagram version of gratitude that ignores hardship, but the kind that exists because of and alongside hardship. The kind that says: yes, the world is broken and complicated, and yet I'm still grateful for these people, this food, this moment of connection.

I can hold both of these truths at once.

I think we are losing the ability to hold both. We've become so good at identifying what's wrong that we have forgotten how to acknowledge what's wrong while still participating in what's meaningful. We throw out entire traditions because they're imperfect. But nothing human is perfect. Nothing with history is simple. Nothing with history exists without contradiction.

Connection and continuity matter. Curiosity, conversation, and community matter.

These gatherings - imperfect, complicated, sometimes painful (because let's be honest, families argue and don't always get along) - still build community. They build family bonds. They give us touchstones.

We're losing the practice of sitting across from someone whose politics you hate and still passing them the potatoes. We're losing the reminder that there's always a human being on the other side of everything.

The table is a place where we practice being in community with people we disagree with. Both of these ideas are crucial, especially right now.

Indigenous peoples cultivated squash and corn and beans and taught colonizers how to survive on this land. We took those foods and made them ours, added our own touches, and created new dishes. And we continue transforming them.

My grandmother's pumpkin pie becomes my pumpkin posset.

Her apple pie becomes my apple pie cheesecake.

Same essence, different expression.

That's evolution. That's how culture works - it moves, it adapts, it transforms. Sometimes we keep recipes exactly as they were, honoring the hands that made them before us. And sometimes we take what we inherited and make it our own.

Both matter. Both keep us connected.

Every Thanksgiving, before we eat, I read this - Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address Greetings to the Natural World. It's a way of pausing, of remembering whose land we're standing on, of acknowledging what came before us. A small act of remembering.

I'm holding space for all of it, and I hope you can too.

I leave you with this -

The table is a place where we can practice being in community even with people we disagree with.

I hope your Thanksgiving is filled with delicious food, real connection, and the courage to hold space for both/and instead of either/or.

Thank you - each one of you - for being here with me, for allowing me to be myself, for connecting with me and creating community.

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