In Norman Rockwell’s famous 1943 painting Freedom From Want,” part of his Four Freedoms series, Rockwell depicts the traditional, American Thanksgiving meal. An elderly couple stands at the end of the table holding an impressive turkey on a platter. Meanwhile, several generations of family members delight in conversation before devouring the feast. But 80 years later, Rockwell’s depiction of Thanksgiving is becoming increasingly rare.
“The traditional Thanksgiving celebration is changing,” Axios reports. “That reflects broader transformations across America: booming cities and social media, a growing foreign-born population, delayed marriage and family building, and young adults relying on “urban tribes” of friends instead of kin.” As times change, so do our holiday traditions. In modern America, Friendsgiving is ascendent.
New Generation, New Traditions
While Thanksgiving is usually celebrated at home with extended family, Friendsgiving is typically a potluck of holiday dishes hosted by friends, for friends — hence the holiday’s name. The first Google searches for the term “Friendsgiving” appeared in 2004, but the term didn’t catch on until about 2013, when a handful of searches turned into an explosion. In the following years, Friendsgiving gathered more and more attention.
Thanksgiving is an established holiday on our calendars, but Friendsgiving has far fewer rules, with people gathering whenever schedules allow — usually during the weeks before or after Thanksgiving proper. This year, one in five Americans will celebrate Friendsgiving. Millennials and Zoomers have adopted the tradition with fervor, though the celebration has become more common in older generations as well.
From Family to Friends
Family was the cornerstone of Thanksgiving long before 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday. But as millennials moved away from home for jobs in bigger cities, traveling home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas ate up vacation days and strained wallets at the beginning of the holiday season.
“Thanksgiving gets the boot with millennials,” explains millennial podcaster Sebastian Conelli on his Loud About Nothing podcast. “One, they go, ‘This is a sh**ty holiday,’ and two, we don’t own homes and we can’t afford to host Thanksgiving,” he laughs.
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Conelli is wrong on the first point but right on the second: a combination of wage stagnation, delayed home ownership, and the cultural extension of adolescence far into one’s early 30s converge to make Friendsgiving a natural alternative. Unable to travel home or host family on their own, young people instituted Friendsgiving somewhat out of necessity. And with millennials delaying marriage longer than any generation, friends are a convenient replacement for far-away family. (RELATED: How to Enjoy a Horrible Thanksgiving Day)
Friendsgiving Supplants Thanksgiving
What began as a proxy for Thanksgiving soon became generational preference. Friendsgiving has its merits — after all, faithful friends are sturdy shelters, whoever finds one finds a treasure — but friends aren’t family, and Friendsgiving can’t truly replace Thanksgiving. But as political polarization increases and culture spirals downward, the Thanksgiving table is portrayed less as a happy reunion and more as a forced confrontation with family.
A recent poll showed that 70 percent of young Americans prefer Friendsgiving to Thanksgiving itself, with 62 percent saying that they “don’t enjoy hosting or even attending a traditional Thanksgiving.” But with abundant food and three types of pie, what’s not to love? Sadly, millennials and Zoomers don’t enjoy spending the holiday with family because of, well, the family at the table.
More than half of the survey’s respondents said they prefer Friendsgiving because they get to avoid personal questions from family. Two in five respondents preferred the substitute holiday because they didn’t have to bite their tongue around the dinner table or worry about offending a relative. Rather than break bread with family — the uncle who voted for Trump included — fragile young people would rather stick to their self-selected tribes, where their lifestyle will never be challenged.
Meguire Hennes, a Gen Z writer put it this way: “Friendsgiving is wholesome and genuinely enjoyable; you’re usually surrounded by people you genuinely like, and you aren’t forced to sit around and put up with the family drama, listen to ridiculous arguments, or judgments from grandma.”
In addition to escaping family, Hennes argues, Friendsgiving simply doesn’t carry the historical baggage that Thanksgiving does. “Gen Z recognizes the pain and suffering that Indigenous people associate with Thanksgiving,” she writes, “So why do we still celebrate something so destructive?”
Not all Friendsgivings are sanitized substitutions for America’s beloved holiday, but the growing trend reveals vast and rapid structural changes — partly due to policy, partly due to personal choices — to American family life. In its place, Millennials and Zoomers have built their own American dream devoid of home, history, family, and faith.
For many, the American dream of a spouse, children, and a white picket fence only exists in a Rockwell painting with a ridiculously utopian premise.
Mary Frances Myler is a writer living in Washington, D.C. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022 with a degree in the Program of Liberal Studies.
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