Friendsgiving: An Invented Tradition
What Happens When We Rewrite the Rules of Thanksgiving?
Last Friday, my home was filled with laughter, clinking glasses, and the savory smell coming from our oven. My friends and I had our own Friendsgiving — a meal that was a testament to our culinary wealth and the stories of immigration that have united us. It was one of those nights: melting cultures, building bonds, and creating tradition.
Unlike Thanksgiving, which has rigid culinary expectations — turkey, pie, stuffing, etc.—and family gatherings, Friendsgiving is a social twist on the feast; it is highly adaptable with classic dishes combined with experimental recipes and takeout, representing the personalities of those who attend.
While it might sound like Friendsgiving is a quirky knockoff of Thanksgiving, it actually taps deeper into how and why people create and sustain a culture.
A Chosen Tradition with the Chosen Families
The term Friendsgiving first appeared in the early 2000s to describe the casual way people celebrated Thanksgiving without family but with friends. The exact origin of the word is still being determined (as most cultural phenomena are), but social media and popular culture helped get the concept some momentum.
Happy Friendsgiving Y’all!!! — Usenet group (Friends of the Friendless), 4 Dec. 2007
According to Merriam-Webster: “The earliest known uses of Friendsgiving in print date to 2007, where it shows up in Usenet posts and on Twitter to refer without explanation to an informal meal with friends.”
While Friendsgiving is a relatively new tradition, many traditions have also been invented at some point in history. Eric Hobsbawm’s ideas on “invented tradition” enlighten us; he writes traditions are not static relics of the past but are often consciously created to fulfill new social needs.
Friendsgiving embodies such a concept by taking the template of the Thanksgiving ritual — a communal meal of thanking— and reimagining it to reflect today’s values of inclusivity, fluidity, and cultural hybridity.
As for fulfilling social needs, one of the most beautiful things about Friendsgiving is the emphasis on chosen families. As immigrants, my friends and I often find ourselves far away from the families we were born into. As someone whose family is thousands of miles away in Turkey, I genuinely feel that Friendsgiving hits close to my heart.
Friendsgiving gives us the opportunity to celebrate the families we’ve built and people who have since become our support systems in foreign lands. Besides, it’s free from family dramas and familial obligations!
Agency, Potlucks, and A Shared Aesthetic
Whenever I host a dinner, I’m usually a nervous bundle, obsessed with every last detail, from making the perfect table to double-checking the food. But, Friendsgiving felt different. Maybe that was because it was with my family that I chose, a gathering of people who have seen me at my best and at my worst, who share laughter over burnt toast with me on mismatched or even plastic plates. There was no pressure for perfection, just the quiet joy of being together.
When the doorbell rang, I realized the table wasn’t fully set, the salad wasn’t in its serving bowl, and the cosmopolitans were still an idea. But I opened the door anyway to smiles and dishes brought in by hands ready to help. A table half-set when the door opens is no problem when you know you’re surrounded by people who care more about the laughter than the linens.
Friendsgiving is also a potluck gathering; instead of burdening a single host with the pressure of cooking a feast, a potluck invites everyone to contribute a dish, turning the holiday into a collective effort. This also democratizes the celebration by making it more inclusive, collaborative, and fun. When everyone brings something from their background, taste, or interests, contributing and sharing becomes what makes the meal special, not just the food itself.
Our menu was as eclectic as our backgrounds. Alongside the turkey, gravy, and cranberry sauce — a nod to the classic Thanksgiving table — we had roasted mushrooms, zucchinis, and potatoes for my vegetarian friends, a bright and fresh Mediterranean salad with pomegranate sauce, and Indian-style mashed potatoes, a recipe my friend learned from her mom. Bowls of Indian soups that my best friend cooked sat beside an array of Turkish mezze, my contribution to the feast.
Since we worked together instead of fretting, the room felt warm — not from the oven, but from the sense of shared effort. And before we sat at the table, we looked at our masterpiece: the mismatched dishes, half-cooked zucchinis, and slightly burned potatoes. It was just perfect — cozy, safe, and ours. These practices of Friendsgiving create the group’s collective identity, a sense of predictability and belonging — two things we desperately crave in a chaotic world.
Friendsgiving takes this collaborative spirit one step further. It reflects a shift in how we view the community. We’re no longer tethered solely to blood ties; instead, we prioritize relationships built on shared values and mutual support. This isn’t just a social trend — it’s an evolutionary one. Humans have always been wired for connection, but our modern hypermobility demands flexibility. Friendsgiving is how we adapt.
Friendsgiving as Resistance
While Thanksgiving is steeped in mythologized narratives, treating Friendsgiving as merely a quirky, romanticized alternative would undermine its potential as a quiet act of resistance. For many, Friendsgiving is a conscious departure from the sanitized imagery of Thanksgiving, exemplified by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris’s The First Thanksgiving 1621.
Ferris’s painting vividly yet misleadingly portrays a harmonious feast between Pilgrims and Indigenous peoples, conveniently omitting the violence and displacement central to colonization. This romanticized depiction perpetuates erasure, while Friendsgiving can be seen as a potential gesture toward decolonization. Replacing the colonial narratives with the reality of our own diverse identities, reframes gratitude as a personal and collective act, blending cultures and cuisines in ways that challenge the uniformity of the holiday’s norms.
In this way, Friendsgiving becomes not just a reimagined tradition but a space for creating new meanings, where the warmth of shared connections replaces outdated narratives — and this was precisely the spirit of our evening.
After a hearty feast that unbuttoned our pants, we skipped the expected night finale of watching football and instead played The Night Cage, a hauntingly beautiful cooperative board game, sipping cosmopolitans as we navigated its labyrinthine darkness. It wasn’t Thanksgiving, not in the classical sense, which is the point entirely — it was Friendsgiving, a holiday of our chosen family.
An Anthropological Toast
Friendsgiving isn’t just about good food and company — it’s about reclaiming agency, creating lived experiences, and reflecting our values. Traditional holidays can feel like obligations, marked by unspoken rules and generational expectations. Friendsgiving, by contrast, is a blank slate. It invites you to decide what matters most and build a meaningful tradition.
So, when you’re gathered around the table with friends who feel like family, take a moment to reflect. You’re not just sharing a meal — you’re participating in creating culture. You’re inventing rituals, crafting meaning, and demonstrating the incredible adaptability of human beings.
What quirky Friendsgiving traditions do you love? Whether it’s mismatched chairs, a playlist of 90s throwbacks, or the host’s store-bought apple pie, feel free to share your stories below!
