Thanksgiving is easily the best holiday of the year, a celebration of all that is good in this country. It centers on food, family and friends. It focuses us on the bounty of our lives, while also reminding us of the fact that we may not always have the bounty that we currently have. I am not one to wax patriotic, but I really feel that the celebration of Thanksgiving sums up a lot about the greatness of our country and the promise of the American dream.

Thanksgiving is first and foremost a festival of harvest and bounty, and more particularly the bounty that can only be found in the Americas. Turkey, cornbread, pumpkin pie, squash, green beans, potatoes and sweet potatoes could never have been part of an Old World meal.

This meal is all about putting as much food on the table as possible: not just any food, though, but homemade, seasonal and cooked from scratch. Most people these days are not pulling their potatoes out of the root cellar or saving the last pie pumpkin from a hard frost, but as one of our last traditional meals, we do these things anyway.

Thanksgiving is also a holiday of being thankful for what we have in this world. Certainly as the most privileged people in the world, we have a lot to be thankful for, even if the way that we got all of it is not necessarily something that we are proud of.

It is often so easy to get caught up in how difficult our lives sometimes seem that Thanksgiving is a great time to remember that our lives are not very difficult at all. In fact we are some of the most privileged people on the planet and we should be thankful for all of the blessings that we have received in life.

In particular, we think about being thankful for our food. We do not often think about our food and how it gets to our table, but on Thanksgiving we will at least thank the cook. And possibly even the thank the turkey for becoming our meal, or, depending on your family, might thank the abstract character from which all food comes.

Thanksgiving is also of course about family, even if it is not your blood family. Maybe it is your Mom’s law school roommate, or your pastor’s family, or the woman down the street whose kids live too far away for her to visit.

When you sit down and share a Thanksgiving meal you become a family, at least for those few hours, and it is a family that you get to choose. Unlike Christmas, there is not really an obligation to spend the holiday with just your family, at least for a lot of people.

Thanksgiving was first shared by people who created a family based on their religious beliefs and shared it with an extended family of people who helped them to survive long enough to be able to celebrate a meal of thanks. (We will ignore the more unpleasant results of this relationship for the time being.)

What ultimately makes Thanksgiving the perfect American meal is how it ultimately embodies a somewhat hubristic spirit. Having such a huge feast at the beginning of the winter is in some ways a little overconfident about the resources you have at hand and how long that winter will last. I love this about Thanksgiving though. Sometimes you just need to have faith that even if it is going to be a long hard winter, you can still enjoy a meal of bounty with the people that mean the most to you.