Thanksgiving: An Annual Gratitude Paradox and Poultry Massacre

Thanksgiving is an Earth custom in which humans gather once annually to acknowledge things they claim to appreciate, despite spending the remaining 364 days behaving as though they’ve never heard of any of them.

The holiday primarily exists in a nation called the United States, where inhabitants commemorate a mythologized feast between colonizing humans and the Indigenous people whose land they were borrowing in the way that one might “borrow” someone’s house by moving in permanently and changing the locks. The historical accuracy of this founding narrative is about as reliable as a chocolate teapot, but humans have never let factual inconvenience interfere with a good excuse for overeating.

The ritual follows a predictable pattern: families convene at a designated dwelling, often traveling vast distances using primitive combustion-powered vehicles, to consume a specially-bred bird called a turkey that has been genetically modified over centuries to be so disproportionately breasted it can barely walk. This creature is roasted to varying degrees of desiccation and served alongside numerous side dishes, the recipes for which cause more interpersonal conflict than most territorial disputes.

What makes Thanksgiving particularly noteworthy to xenoanthropologists is that Earth remains the only known civilization in the galaxy to require a designated holiday for expressing gratitude. Most developed civilizations fall into one of two categories: either they maintain constant awareness of their circumstances and feel appropriately grateful at all times, or they have achieved sufficient philosophical clarity to recognize that existence is a random accident in an indifferent universe and there’s categorically nothing to be thankful for. Humans, characteristically, have managed to position themselves in the uncomfortable middle ground, requiring annual reminders to appreciate things like “family” and “health” and “not being eaten by predators,” which other species simply take as baseline conditions of not being dead.

The holiday features several subspecies of tradition:

The Feast – A meal containing enough calories to sustain a small human for approximately six days, consumed in roughly two hours. The central turkey is surrounded by supporting dishes including mashed potatoes, stuffing (bread that has been stuffed inside the bird, then removed and served separately, in a culinary decision that makes sense to absolutely nobody), cranberry sauce (which arrives in a can-shaped cylinder that jiggles ominously), and something called green bean casserole that appears to be green beans suspended in a cream-based adhesive and topped with fried onions.

The Football Watching – Following the meal, male humans traditionally enter a semi-comatose state on soft furniture while watching other humans collide with each other repeatedly over possession of an oblong ball. This custom is believed to have evolved as a diplomatic solution to prevent conversations about politics or religion.

The Cleanup Argument – The period during which family members engage in ritualized disputes about who should wash dishes, despite the obvious solution of using the dwelling’s automated dish-cleaning machine.

The Thankfulness Performance – Some families practice a custom wherein each member must verbally state things they’re grateful for, typically resulting in vague declarations about “family” and “health” that could apply to any gathering of carbon-based life forms at any point in history.

The day after Thanksgiving, known as “Black Friday,” humans immediately abandon all pretense of gratitude and trample each other in retail establishments to acquire discounted consumer goods, which rather efficiently summarizes the entire species.

Remarkably, despite the holiday’s explicit purpose being to encourage appreciation of one’s circumstances, it consistently ranks among the most stressful days of the Earth year, involving family conflicts, travel delays, cooking disasters, and the existential weight of realizing you must do this again in precisely twelve months.

Off-world visitors should note that declining a Thanksgiving invitation is considered a grave insult, while accepting one commits you to approximately seven hours of awkward conversation with humans you wouldn’t voluntarily spend time with under any other circumstances. The Guide recommends claiming urgent business on the other side of the galaxy.

Survival Rating: 3/10 (marginally improved if you enjoy turkey).