Author
This Thanksgiving, something feels different as Americans gather around the table. The rituals are still there, turkey, football, family fights over politics, but the meaning underlying them all has shifted.
Coming out of years of pandemic turmoil, lockdowns fracturing communities apart, and a national soul-searching over institutional trust, this Thanksgiving carries a weight that no other generation has ever seen.
As a historian who watched American freedoms erode during the pandemic response, I find myself reflecting on why this particular holiday endures when so much else has changed. What does it reveal about our identity as a nation? And can shared rituals help us reconnect after years that tested the very fabric of our social order?
I lived in Los Angeles during 2020 and thus have seen how quickly social order could collapse. Basic freedoms vanished overnight. The population was stirred into fear. Society plunged into chaos over a virus with a fatality rate under 0.2 percent. What I learned during those bewildering and terrifying months was that our way of life is but one 'crisis' away from complete evisceration.
Yet in the midst of all this dislocation, one thing remained constant: the human hunger for contact and for ritual.
When governments outlawed gatherings, families found ways to mark Thanksgiving nonetheless, often through screens or in disregard of arbitrary dictates.
And that is telling, about human nature and about America.
Thanksgiving serves several vital functions:
• It grounds us in gratitude.
• It transcends politics, creating a neutral ground on which Americans of every stripe can come together.
•It reinforces community bonding.
This year's Thanksgiving arrives as Americans continue to grapple with the aftermath of the pandemic years. Families are still rebuilding relationships fractured by mandates that separated grandparents from grandchildren, by enforcement of policies that had no basis in science, by the demonization of those who questioned authority. The lockdowns killed more people than they saved; school closures destroyed a generation of educational prospects; unelected bureaucrats seized unprecedented power. Yet those responsible faced absolutely no accountability. Instead, they moved on, pretending their policies were necessary and effective, hoping Americans would simply forget.
But Americans have not forgotten. This Thanksgiving, as we gather with family members we may have been prohibited from seeing during the darkest days of authoritarianism, we carry that memory.
The holiday takes on new meaning as a celebration not just of historical gratitude, but of reunification after forced separation.
Across the country, families are working hard to rebuild traditions that were interrupted. Some are returning to in-person gatherings for the first time in years. Others are establishing new rituals that acknowledge what we have been through.
Many are simply thankful for the freedom to gather without government interference.
It is the act of gathering itself that becomes a form of quiet resistance.
Every family dinner, every shared meal, every moment of connection reaffirms our humanity in the face of policies that treat us as mere disease vectors to be managed by bureaucratic decree.
At root, Thanksgiving is about gratitude, a virtue that the authoritarian systems of the world seek to squash.
Grateful people are more difficult to control. They recognize what they have, rather than nursing a manufactured grievance.
They appreciate freedom, rather than demanding safety at any price.
This kind of gratitude reinforces community identity. When we acknowledge what we've been through together, when we celebrate simple freedoms that were taken for granted before 2020, we reinforce bonds that hold communities together. We remember that social order is fragile and worth protecting, not through authoritarian control, but through voluntary association and mutual respect.
Thanksgiving 2025 feels different because we are different. We've seen how swiftly freedom can disappear. We've experienced the corrosive effects of fear-driven policy. We've watched institutions we trusted reveal their authoritarian impulses. But we've also discovered the resilience of human connection and the enduring power of shared rituals.
-Thomas Beckett Kane is a historian and author of The Reckoning: A Definitive History of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Other Absurdities.