The Thanksgiving Dinner Party: Hosting America's Defining Meal

If you want to understand the American idea of home, host a Thanksgiving dinner. Thanksgiving is the great American feast — the meal that, more than any other, defines the national table, the national family, and the national idea of gratitude. To host it is to take on one of the most important entertaining obligations in American life, and to understand it is to understand the country itself.

**Origins**

As Wikipedia records, the modern Thanksgiving holiday is based on a harvest festival shared by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Native American tribe at Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, in 1621. The only two surviving documents that describe that first meal record a feast of freshly killed deer, assorted wildfowl, cod and bass, and flint corn — not, as Food52 notes, the turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie of the modern table, most of which had not yet arrived in New England. The lavish feasts ascribed to the 17th-century Thanksgiving were, in fact, a creation of 19th-century writers who sought to popularize a unifying holiday. Thanksgiving was made a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, at the urging of the editor Sarah Josepha Hale, and the date was fixed as the fourth Thursday of November by Congress in 1941.

**The Table**

The Thanksgiving table is the most codified meal in American life. The centerpiece is the roast turkey — Alexander Hamilton proclaimed that 'no citizen of the United States should refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day' — surrounded by stuffing or dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole (often topped with marshmallows), green bean casserole, dinner rolls, and, for dessert, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and apple pie. Many of the dishes are made from ingredients native to the Americas — turkey, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, cranberries — and the meal is a survey of the agricultural bounty of the continent. The saying of grace before the meal is a traditional feature of the feast, and the meal is followed, in many households, by the great American tradition of the leftover turkey sandwich.

**The Hosting**

Hosting Thanksgiving is the great annual test of the American host. The turkey must be ordered, thawed, brined, and roasted; the sides must be timed to finish together; the table must be set for a crowd that often spans three generations; and the cook must manage the competing traditions of the family — whose stuffing, whose cranberry sauce, whose pie. The genius of the meal is that it is meant to be abundant: there should be more than anyone can eat, and the leftovers are part of the tradition. A brined turkey of 12 to 14 pounds feeds a gathering of 8 to 10, and the host who sets the table for the family is performing one of the defining rituals of American domestic life.

**How to Host One**

To host a Thanksgiving dinner, plan the menu a week ahead. Order a fresh turkey (one pound per guest), brine it overnight, and roast it with butter and aromatics. Set the classic sides — stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce (fresh, not canned, if you can), sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, rolls. Set the table with the good china and the candles, and make the pies the day before — pumpkin, pecan, and apple. Pour the wine, say the grace, and carve the bird. The point is the gathering: the meal that brings the family to the same table and that, in its abundance, expresses the gratitude that gives the holiday its name.

**Why It Matters**

Thanksgiving is the great American feast — a meal rooted in a 1621 harvest shared with the Wampanoag, codified by 19th-century writers, made a national holiday in wartime, and carried into the present by every family that sets the table. To host it is to take part in one of the oldest and most important of all American entertaining traditions.

**References**

- Wikipedia: Thanksgiving dinner — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_dinner

- Food52: What Food Was Actually Served at the First Thanksgiving — https://food52.com/story/20949-what-was-actually-served-at-the-first-thanksgiving

- Wikipedia: Thanksgiving (United States) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_(United_States)