Thanksgiving Isn’t the Same Anymore & Why I Can’t Celebrate the Way I Used To
Remember when Thanksgiving was simple? When it was just turkey, stuffing, and gratitude? When the story we learned in elementary school felt complete and uncomplicated: Pilgrims in buckled hats, Native Americans in feathered headdresses, everyone gathered around a bountiful table in perfect harmony? That narrative felt safe, clean, wrapped up with a bow made of corn husks and good intentions.
But somewhere between childhood and now, the story started to crack. Maybe it happened when you read a book that told a different version. Maybe it was a documentary, a conversation, or simply the moment you started asking questions that nobody wanted to answer. The comfortable story we were spoon fed alongside mashed potatoes began to crumble, revealing something far more complicated, far more painful, and far more true underneath. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Once you know, you cannot unknow.
This shift changes everything about how we approach this November holiday. It transforms a day of supposed gratitude into a day of reckoning. And if you are someone who values truth, who walks a path that honors the earth and respects all living beings, who believes that real magic comes from facing reality rather than hiding from it, then you know that Thanksgiving cannot be the same anymore. The question is not whether we should acknowledge this truth, but how we move forward with it. How do we honor what was lost while still finding meaning in a day that has become so deeply embedded in our culture?
Through the years I have read many books on the Indigenous from biography, to memoir, to fiction, to other non fiction, to history. Currently I am listening to the audiobook titled Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America by Michael John Witgen, narrated by Kaipo Schwab. I highly recommended it to anyone who wants a place to start with learning the true history of the natives of America.
From Goodreads: Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and U.S. development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves. Outnumbering white settlers well into the nineteenth century, they leveraged their political savvy to advance a dual citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal members to lay claim to a place in U.S. civil society. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of U.S. expansion. Deeply researched and passionately written, Seeing Red will command attention from readers who are invested in the enduring issues of equality, equity, and national belonging at its core.
The Story We Were Told Was a Fairy Tale
Picture the classroom scene. Construction paper Pilgrims with paper plate faces. Handprint turkeys in brown and orange. The teacher explained how the nice Pilgrims came to America and the helpful Native Americans taught them to plant corn, and everyone was so grateful that they had a big feast together. The end. Gold star. Happy Thanksgiving.
This is the story so many of us absorbed as children, a sanitized version that erased violence, removed context, and transformed colonization into a friendly cultural exchange. We were taught that the Indigenous peoples of this land welcomed European settlers with open arms. That they shared their knowledge willingly. That they were compensated fairly, or better yet, that everyone simply lived in harmony. The narrative implied that Native Americans were passive participants in their own displacement, as if they handed over the keys to an entire continent with a smile and a handshake.
The truth is starkly different. The land was not given. It was taken. Through broken treaties, through forced relocation, through violence and disease, through systematic attempts to erase entire cultures and languages. The Wampanoag people who did interact with the Pilgrims in 1621 would soon face decimation. Their leader’s son, Metacom, would later fight desperately in King Philip’s War to protect what remained of their lands and people. He lost. His head was displayed on a pike in Plymouth for decades. This is not the stuff of elementary school pageants, but it is the truth.
What we were taught was not history. It was propaganda designed to make colonization palatable, to allow a growing nation to celebrate its origins without confronting the genocide that made it possible. And many of us, raised on this fairy tale, are now adults grappling with the cognitive dissonance of loving a holiday while understanding its foundation is built on tremendous suffering and loss.
The Reckoning Changes How We Gather
Once you understand the real history, sitting down to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner feels different. The abundance on the table takes on new meaning when you consider that it represents foods and land that were stewarded by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. The gratitude we are supposed to express becomes complicated when you realize we are often grateful for a lifestyle made possible by displacement and colonization.
This does not mean you have to abandon the holiday entirely, though some people choose to do exactly that. Many Indigenous people and their allies observe the National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, gathering in Plymouth to honor ancestors and acknowledge ongoing injustices faced by Native peoples. This is a powerful and necessary counter narrative to the celebratory feast happening in homes across the country. It is a reminder that while some people are celebrating, others are mourning, and both realities exist simultaneously.
For those who do still gather on Thanksgiving, the reckoning often means incorporating acknowledgment and education into the day. It might mean beginning the meal by recognizing whose land you are on, researching the Indigenous peoples who originally inhabited your area. It might mean donating to Indigenous led organizations, supporting Native American causes, or buying from Indigenous artists and businesses. It might mean having uncomfortable conversations with family members who still cling to the sanitized version of history, who insist that we should not “ruin” the holiday with politics or negativity. But truth is not negativity. Truth is simply truth, and it deserves a seat at the table.
Gratitude Through a Different Lens
Here is what becomes clear when you sit with this new understanding: gratitude itself is not the problem. Being thankful for what we have, for the people we love, for food and warmth and community, these are all beautiful impulses. The problem is divorcing that gratitude from context, from history, from responsibility. The problem is performing thankfulness while ignoring the cost at which our comfort came.
True gratitude requires honesty. It requires acknowledging that the abundance many of us enjoy exists on stolen land, built through the labor and suffering of people who were systematically oppressed. This is not comfortable knowledge. It sits heavy in the stomach, harder to digest than any amount of turkey and pie. But spiritual growth, real magic, the kind of transformation that actually matters, never comes from comfort. It comes from facing difficult truths and deciding what to do with them.
So what does gratitude look like through this lens? It looks like thankfulness paired with action. It looks like appreciating what we have while actively working to address ongoing injustices faced by Indigenous communities. It looks like learning the real history and teaching it to the next generation, refusing to pass on the sanitized fairy tale we were given. It looks like supporting Indigenous sovereignty, land back movements, and the protection of sacred sites. Gratitude without action is just performance. Gratitude with action becomes something powerful, something that honors both what we have and what was taken to get it.
Finding Meaning in the Uncomfortable Space
So where does this leave us? Sitting in the tension between tradition and truth, between family expectations and personal values, between the desire for simple celebration and the weight of historical reality. This is an uncomfortable space to occupy. There is no clean answer, no way to perfectly navigate Thanksgiving that will satisfy everyone or resolve all the contradictions.
But perhaps that is exactly where we need to be. Perhaps the discomfort is the point. When we allow ourselves to sit in the complexity, to feel both gratitude and grief, to acknowledge both what we love about gathering with family and what is deeply wrong about the foundation of this holiday, we create space for something more authentic than the false simplicity we were offered as children. We create space for real reckoning, real change, real growth.
This might mean your Thanksgiving looks different now. Maybe you incorporate land acknowledgments and Indigenous history into your gathering. Maybe you choose to volunteer or donate instead of cook. Maybe you have difficult conversations that make some family members uncomfortable. Maybe you observe the National Day of Mourning. Maybe you skip the holiday altogether and simply gather with loved ones on a different day, divorcing the celebration from the problematic date. There is no single right way to navigate this, only the commitment to do so with eyes open and heart engaged.
The magical path, the spiritual path, whatever you want to call it, is ultimately about truth. It is about seeing the world clearly, honoring what is real, and making choices that align with your deepest values. Thanksgiving may not be the same anymore, but that is because you are not the same anymore. You have grown. You have learned. You cannot unknow what you now know, and you should not want to.
Honoring What Was Lost
The story we were told tried to erase Indigenous peoples from their own narrative, reducing them to helpful side characters in a tale of European triumph. But Indigenous peoples are not relics of the past. They are here, now, continuing to fight for their rights, their land, their cultures, their languages, and their survival. More than five hundred tribes are recognized in the United States, and many more exist without federal recognition. These are living communities with ongoing struggles and incredible resilience.
Honoring what was lost begins with acknowledging what continues. It means recognizing that Indigenous peoples have not disappeared, despite centuries of policies designed to make them so. It means listening to Indigenous voices, supporting Indigenous led movements, and following Indigenous leadership on issues that affect their communities. It means understanding that the theft of land and the attempt to destroy cultures did not end in the 1600s or even the 1800s. It continues in different forms today, from pipeline battles to forced sterilizations to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
When we talk about how Thanksgiving is not the same anymore, we are really talking about how we are not the same anymore. We have allowed ourselves to see clearly, and that sight comes with responsibility. The responsibility to remember. The responsibility to speak truth. The responsibility to take action, however small, toward justice and repair. This is heavy work. It is uncomfortable work. But it is necessary work, and it is work that honors both the Indigenous peoples who were here long before Thanksgiving became a holiday and those who are still here, still fighting, still surviving, still thriving despite everything.
Redefining the Day for Ourselves
You do not owe anyone your participation in a holiday that feels wrong to you now. You do not owe anyone your silence about the truth. You do not owe anyone comfort when that comfort comes at the cost of honesty. What you do owe, to yourself and to the truth, is the courage to make choices that align with your values, even when those choices are unpopular or misunderstood.
Some people will not understand why you cannot just enjoy Thanksgiving the way you used to. They will say you are being too sensitive, too political, too negative. They will accuse you of ruining a perfectly good holiday. But here is what they do not understand: you are not ruining anything. The holiday was already broken. You are simply refusing to pretend otherwise. You are choosing truth over comfort, and that is always the harder path, but it is also the one that leads to real transformation.
Redefining the day for yourself might mean creating entirely new traditions that honor truth while still allowing for connection and celebration. It might mean gathering with like minded people who share your values and your commitment to honoring Indigenous peoples. It might mean using the day for service, for learning, for activism. It might mean something quiet and personal, a day of reflection and acknowledgment rather than feasting. Whatever it means for you, let it be authentic. Let it be honest. Let it reflect who you are now, not who you were when the story was still intact.
The magic of this path, the real magic, is that it asks us to be brave enough to see clearly and compassionate enough to care about what we see. It asks us to hold multiple truths at once: that we can love our families while disagreeing with them, that we can feel gratitude while acknowledging injustice, that we can honor tradition while refusing to perpetuate harmful narratives. This is the work of conscious living, and it is not easy, but it is worth it.
Moving Forward with Open Eyes
Thanksgiving will never be the same, and that is okay. In fact, it is more than okay. It is necessary. The loss of innocence, the shattering of the comfortable narrative, the reckoning with difficult truths, these are all part of growing into a more whole, more conscious, more authentic version of ourselves. We cannot change the past, but we can change how we engage with it and how we move forward from it.
This November, as you navigate whatever your relationship with Thanksgiving has become, give yourself permission to feel all of it. The grief for what you thought you knew. The anger at having been lied to. The discomfort of sitting at tables where others still cling to the fairy tale. The determination to do better, to know better, to be better. All of these feelings can coexist, and all of them are valid.
And know that you are not alone in this. There are many of us who cannot celebrate the way we once did, who carry the weight of this knowledge, who are trying to figure out how to honor truth while still finding meaning in a day that has become so complicated. We are rewriting the narrative, one family gathering at a time, one difficult conversation at a time, one act of support for Indigenous communities at a time. The work is slow, but it matters.
Thanksgiving is not the same anymore because we are not the same anymore. And while that loss of simplicity can feel painful, it also opens the door to something deeper, something truer, something that actually honors the complexities of history and the dignity of all people. That is the real feast worth celebrating: the courage to see clearly, the commitment to truth, and the determination to do better.
Come join me for coffee and more honest conversations about navigating modern life with intention and truth. Read more posts here at Nevermore Lane, where we explore what it means to live a magical life grounded in reality.
Like what you read? Drop me a line – let’s chat over virtual coffee.
~ Chrystal
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