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The Pilgrims thanked God while digging graves. We complain during Thanksgiving while passing the pie.
Three hundred and four years ago.
Through storms and disease and death, a small band of believers, seeking religious liberty, gathered on the edge of a barren wilderness to give thanks. Certainly, they had every reason not to give thanks. They had to flee their homeland, had suffered a miserable voyage, and the majority of those they knew were across the ocean or dead. Nonetheless, they gathered with the remains of what they had and a people not familiar to theirs and bowed their heads in prayer and thanksgiving. These forebears acknowledged that even in hardship, God had not forsaken them. Thanksgiving, in its oldest form, was not born out of prosperity but out of perseverance. It was an act of obedience, a declaration of faith in the face of affliction.
In modernity, we have forgotten this. We stress in preparation to see family members we intentionally keep distant, are short with those around us, and thank God more when the holiday is over than on the day of prayer and thanksgiving itself. Our culture has softened the holidays, sanded down its edges, and turned it into little more than a seasonal entry on the calendar. Do you believe the Pilgrims gathered to thank God among their shrinking population because their lives were splendid? And do you believe they were begrudgingly speaking to their families at the dinner table? I think not.
What is Thanksgiving to the modern family?
A day to gather and watch football, overindulge on nutrient-stripped food, and typically overconsume alcohol. It is yet another opportunity for families to argue, to remember the dislike of extended family, and for hospitals to capitalize on the increased need for their services. This does not even address the diabetic epidemic, and progressively fewer households make a fully homemade Thanksgiving meal. And while families lose sight of the meaning, the nation’s leaders don’t help either. Since the day President Roosevelt moved up Thanksgiving to extend the shopping season, the presidents have taken the longstanding tradition of the Thanksgiving proclamation—once a heartfelt plea and rejoicing to God—and stripped it of meaning while replacing it with other elements, such as a turkey pardoning (rarely living to see the next Thanksgiving). I put to you the question: do any of these have an ounce of authenticity, of genuine thanks, or even tradition the original intention?
Now, in 2025, times are again volatile. Political divide is greater than ever, the conservatives question the validity of their own majority, foreign wars escalate, the youth feel isolated, and the economy has yet to strongly benefit the pocketbook. Families feel the weight; church assemblies feel the weight; the everyman feels it pressing upon his life and home. A moral confusion has seemed to cloud the nation. Yet even this does not seem to be the string to tie the country, and more so, communities and the family unit back together. These pressures, as seen for over a century, tempt the people to cave into inwardness and rejection of those who ought to be closest to them, and to look toward silence and a bottle instead of the One who is in control of it all. But hard times do not suspend the duty of thanksgiving — they intensify it. The Pilgrims thanked God while burying their dead; surely, we can thank Him while navigating the storms of our age.
Thanksgiving, of all days, should be longed for and brings about a sense of loss when it has passed—no different than Christmas itself ought to be. Beyond even the delicious foods and desserts, the company of family, friends, and loved ones is the greatest opportunity to live in thanksgiving and prayer at the hallmark of the year.
However, modern man has a predilection to forget. We forget the God who carried our ancestors into this great land, our forefathers who fought and died to secure our liberties. America, the beautiful, the land that I love. We forget the virtues that shaped a people capable of enduring winters far harsher than ours, in principles greater than ours. And we forget the truth that gratitude is not a feeling but a discipline — a moral obligation that strengthens the soul against bitterness. Revisionists have spent years tearing down the Pilgrims just as they have attempted to smear the Founders, painting both groups as villains to excuse the failures of our own age. But the record stands: a flawed yet God-fearing people laid the foundations of a nation by giving thanks in suffering and trusting Providence more than comfort. Their legacy is not oppression — it is endurance. It is faith.
Despite the anti-federalist concern for nationalizing the holiday of Thanksgiving—a legitimate concern that manifested numerous problems, yet also saved its very existence—, in his 1815 Thanksgiving and Prayer proclamation, James Madison said:
“No people ought to feel greater obligations to celebrate the goodness of the Great Disposer of Events of the destiny of Nations than the people of the United States […] who were distinguished in their arduous struggles by multiplied tokens of His benign interposition.”
This brings us to our homes, our communities, to our very tables—the last stronghold of a fraying culture. Thanksgiving was meant to be a covenantal gathering, a time to thank God and give to your community, as ordained by God. Yet too often, we enter this holiday with resentment simmering beneath the surface (or often, for all to see), grievances held tighter than the blessings we refuse to acknowledge. The modern American can scarcely speak kindly to his own kin, yet demands the fruits of gratitude without sowing its humility.
This must end. Truly, it must end. If the world outside trembles, then the dinner table must grow stronger to withstand. If the culture fractures, then the family must become the bulwark that refuses to crack. Stop weaponizing the table. Stop treating loved ones as adversaries. Stop allowing the bitterness of the age to seep into the sanctity of your own household. Gratitude demands humility, and humility demands grace — especially toward the people God has placed in your life. These are the people you were given, who will not change.
Thanksgiving is not merely a remembrance of what once was. It is a reorientation—a deliberate return to the truth our forefathers understood:
That gratitude honors God.
That gratitude strengthens families.
And that gratitude anchors a nation in times of trial.
We cannot control the storms that rage in the world. However, we can control our relations to those around us. We can give thanks to God and share our gratitude with our loved ones. And surely we can choose to remember that the same God who sustained the Pilgrims through death and darkness is the God who sustains us now.
And perhaps, if we recover the discipline of gratitude — genuine, humble, God-centered gratitude — we may yet reclaim what this culture has forgotten. The first Thanksgiving was not a celebration of ease, but a declaration of faith. Ours should be the same.
Daniel C. Green is a journalist, commentator, and host leading The Eagle Eye, a multimedia platform covering politics, culture, activism, Christianity, and the rising global order. Find his work at theeagleye.net and on Substack, X, YouTube, and Rumble as @theeagleyenews and @realtheeagleeye.
