When I was young, we never really celebrated Thanksgiving. It was mainly just me and my mother, who immigrated here from the Philippines, where Thanksgiving is nonexistent (she also began celebrating Christmas in October and simply didn’t like Thanksgiving turkey). So, sure, we gave our thanks and practiced our gratitude, but since it was just the two us, we never really had the grand American Thanksgiving dinners depicted on the television — no large family sitting around a table, no giant oven-roasted bird splayed amid buttery mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, creamy mac and cheese, and fresh-baked pecan pie. Instead, for the first few years of my upbringing, we ate traditional Filipino dishes — rice and savory chicken adobo, pancit noodles stir-fried with pork and vegetables. Thanksgiving was just another holiday that came and went in my household.
However, when I got a little older, my mother and I started spending Thanksgiving at her friend’s house. There, we would have a combination of traditional Thanksgiving foods and staple Filipino dishes. Along with the sweet honey ham, we would have our savory pancit noodles, which sat next to a tray of steaming casserole, and spaghetti topped with sweet tomato sauce and sliced hot dog pieces. Despite the menu looking a little different from the prototypical Thanksgiving spread, I felt like I got to experience a “proper” Thanksgiving, with big gatherings of “cousins” who talked about holiday wish lists and school drama while the adults chatted over glasses of wine. Soon enough, Thanksgiving was no longer just another day for my mother and me, but a tradition wherein a family of friends gathered together to enjoy and celebrate each other’s presence.
But while I cherished these Thanksgivings, I still felt like I was missing out on another beloved American tradition: Friendsgiving. Growing up, I never really had a “proper” friend group. I was the shy type, with friends who were all part of their own respective friend groups, with me sort of floating among them. Thus, I never hosted Friendsgiving in high school, nor was I ever invited to a Friendsgiving. Every November, I’d see recaps posted by friends and their other friends and hear stories about how their gatherings went. And every November, I felt a cherished moment pass me by.
When I got to college, I decided to change that. I’d been feeling incredibly lonely as I struggled to make friends and craved my family’s love back home. However, I tried to put myself out there as much as I could, and in the fall of 2022, a peer and I got together to co-host a Friendsgiving event called Destress Dinner, in which we catered Thanksgiving foods and offered a safe space for students to hang out and relax before finals in December. For this night, although we weren’t all necessarily friends (and we definitely weren’t family), we were all mutually brought together to celebrate Thanksgiving as a community, and that felt great. (Plus, in the process, that peer who I co-hosted with became a friend I still have to this day!)
Last year, I hosted another Friendsgiving dinner — this time, just with two close friends. We decorated with a balloon turkey (which we named Terry), and prepared a delicious charcuterie spread, umami vegetable pancit noodles, and traditional stuffing. We celebrated the friendship that had grown among the three of us (and Terry), over a delicious meal that combined a variety of traditions.
Like my Friendsgiving the year before, or the Thanksgivings I grew up with, it may still not have been the picturesque familial tableau that I was told Thanksgiving was supposed to be when I was a child, but I still experienced great food, a sense of community, and an appreciation for the life I have — and I’ve realized that, when it comes to Thanksgiving, this is all that really matters.