The millennial war on Thanksgiving

It pains me to speak ill of my own generation—though I am at the older end of the pool, having been born in 1983 — but I can’t ignore the signs anymore. It’s not enough that we’re abandoning religion, renting instead of getting mortgages, avoiding marriage, and delaying childbearing. We’re also trampling the time-honored, family-centric traditions of Thanksgiving with our own freewheeling, entitled brew of gatherings, held not at faraway family homes but in our own cities.

Mark my words, everyone with a zeal for the Good Old Days and some extra time on your hands: “Friendsgiving” is the new “Happy Holidays.”

The death of Thanksgiving

After being invited to four different “Friendsgiving” parties over the last few weeks, I have to admit that this troubling phenomenon is truly taking hold.

I know what Thanksgiving is meant to be: a nice glass of wine, stuffed turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, rolls, a big green bean casserole with those crunchy canned onions on top, and pumpkin pie, eaten alongside at least a few individuals whose views on politics and social justice enrage you, all served up the day after a white-knuckle, hours-long, bumper-to-bumper car ride up or down I-95. It’s about enforced self-conscious declarations of gratitude as dinner conversation. It’s about separating the kids’ table from the adults’ table, to the mortification of tweens and teens everywhere. It’s about thanking your lucky stars if someone in the household can stir up a decent pan of gravy and ignoring the greasy lumps if no one ever mastered it.

If we forget these things, who are we?

Look at Friendsgiving. These parties, sometimes held a few days before or after Thanksgiving Day, sometimes on the day itself, revolve around that buzzword of people without the good sense to be satisfied by sitting down with the people who share your God-given DNA: your “chosen family.”

In contrast to Thanksgiving, in which one woman, and perhaps her sisters and daughters, toil over an enormous meal, served to the entire extended family (and then cleaned up by these same intrepid women), Friendsgiving parties are potluck abominations that take many of the traditional pressures of hosting off of the hosts.

Sure, Friendsgiving dinners have not gone so far off the deep end as to eschew a host-roasted turkey (albeit an organic, free-range “heirloom” breed bird that must be preordered from a local farm at great expense, instead of lifted out of the freezer at the supermarket). But there’s no controlling what side dishes arrive. Kale salad. Gluten-free apple crisp. Hummus. Eggplant and olive appetizers. Coconut curry. A range of local microbrews. Where will it end?

The millennial agenda

Sadly, Friendsgiving is the natural outgrowth of the same millennial lifestyle characteristics that are crumbling the fabric of our society at large. It’s the inevitable result of our unmoored, unchurched, unmarried lives. And even married or partnered millennials, instead of arguing over whose parents they should dine with on Thanksgiving, are just inviting their friends over instead, and asking them to bring a dish. Seeking to fill the void left by our rejection of the traditional nuclear family, and lacking the resources to travel for Thanksgiving because of our paltry jobs in the new gig economy, we turn to large networks of peers we enjoy spending time with. We invite them into our homes for long, congenial, crowd-sourced meals followed by drinks and games, and an incredibly cavalier attitude to bringing the dog and letting anyone who wants to crash on the sofa. What should be a dressy and decorous meeting with rarely seen relatives who want to know when you plan to start a family becomes a social free-for-all with friends of friends.

Instead of feeling isolated and saddened by their failure to fit the mold of past generations, people without living family members, or who are estranged from their families or living far away, or who shocked their loved ones by getting a divorce, find welcome and joy among friends and coworkers. What kind of incentive is this for bolstering the traditional family that is the key to happy children, economic stability, and national security?

If we don’t act fast to stem the Friendsgiving tide, Grandma’s good china, passing the porcelain gravy boat, and biting your tongue at loved ones’ vaguely bigoted comments will be a thing of the past.

“We are playing Cards against Humanity if you want to stop by!” a friend texted me after inviting me to her Friendsgiving. It’s all a reminder that there’s ample opportunity to rage against the secular and commercial dilution of Christmas in the month between America’s turkey dinner and December 25. In the meantime, is this what Thanksgiving has become?