Oddly enough, we just always called that Thanksgiving. Sometimes we visited family, sometimes family visited us, sometimes we just gathered with whoever was around.

The need to create some sort of alternative label confuses me, but then again I grew up semi-nomadic.

Without exaggeration nor sarcasm, I don't think a single person in the US past 5th grade is celebrating Thanksgiving to honor those events. You learn about the pilgrims in elementary school, and the origins of the holiday. Then, once you're a little older, you learn about all the horrible things that happened.

And popular culture doesn't depict it as being about that, either; it's a time to give thanks, and be with friends and family, and eat lots of food, and go shopping soon, but I never see it depicted as even ostensibly being about the history of it.

So in my experience, you're sort of preaching to the choir, and, to extend the metaphor, EVERYBODY is in the choir.

If I'm mistaken, and someone reading this does celebrate Thanksgiving to honor the history of it, I'd be interested to hear from you.

Not to mention that a harvest feast is common to a lot of cultures and time periods this time of year. Even though modern agriculture had made seasonal harvests less of an issue for people in the relatively wealthy part of the world I live in, I have no problem with having a holiday centered around eating, drinking, spending time with friends, and celebrating the things we have with small gifts and generosity among those I care about.

I was addressing the question regarding the compulsion to rebrand

> The need to create some sort of alternative label confuses me

Also, I work in a hostel and these past weeks I have seen innumerable 20+ year staff members tell the classic pilgrim and indian story to many foreigners questions of 'what is thanksgiving'

So perhaps my personal experience struck me sensitive this morning, but I also feel the standard menu, which seriously requires a revisit, also continues to tell this story on many tables every thanksgiving across the states

How many of us have heard heckled from the pews this year, or thought themselves, when a suggestion to change a traditional staple: 'how can you call it thanksgiving without turkey'potatoes'pumpkin pie'whatever'; which is a direct effect of the history and personal traditions of the holiday

> I was addressing the question regarding the compulsion to rebrand

I'm not sure "rebrand" is the right word; "Friendsgiving" is a deviation from the well-established norm of spending Thanksgiving with family, so giving it a separate, derivative name doesn't seem inappropriate. I myself am in the middle of organizing a separate celebration with friends, on Saturday, and I'm also calling it something that ends in "-sgiving", because we're doing it in the general spirit of (obviously not-historic) Thanksgiving, but it doesn't fit the cultural standard (on Thursday, with family).

> I have seen innumerable 20+ year staff members tell the classic pilgrim and indian story to many foreigners questions of 'what is thanksgiving'

If I were asked that, I think I would give the same answer. Though I would also tell someone what Christmas was about, if asked, without feeling the need to explain how I don't believe it or for what reasons.

I also don't think I'd add the "disclaimer" about how messed up the whole original Thanksgiving stuff was unless someone pressed me for it or inquired further, though if I think about it, I'm not sure why; it almost seems like a separate question to me. Interesting.

What do you think?

I suppose this is why I used the descriptor 'value assertion'

How does a native American reservation celebrate the third Thursday?

My deliberate disdain for some cultural artifacts are mainly to be inclusive to those who are potentially marginalized by the status quo, Full inclusion is a highest value of mine that I try to assert in in my actions and thoughts

Christmas, like all religious activities, is exclusive to everyone who believes outside a community's line, and as such is abhorrent to me, and i state the same to anyone who asks my understanding of it

It feels a scientific approach: your world is flat unless you choose to extend your sight beyond the horizon; and I'm always on the lookout for horizons I have yet to extend

My understanding is that the traditional U.S. "Thanksgiving meal" isn't historically accurate either.

Hijack alert, I'm making this about geeks. Feel free to ignore.

I did one of these, I think, for Roger Faulkner, Mr /proc (not the linux one, the original one).

Some back story, I needed to learn something from Roger, I was working in building 5 at Sun with the rest of the Sun kernel people, I was upstairs, Roger was downstairs, whatever. So I was pretty junior and I walked into Roger's office and he ignored me. I was sitting on his desk next to his monitor, he was looking at the monitor and typing away. I waited.

He eventually said something like "what the fuck do you want?"

And I said "I want to know about <something I've long since forgotten>"

And he said "why should I teach you about that?"

And I said "because I'm going to sit here and belch and fart until you do"

He laughed and we became friends.

We were both nerds with very few friends but when we connected over technology, that's a bond. It's a bond that is hard to put into words and have people understand, but we bonded (you guys should get the nerd bond. I hope). It turned into a thanksgiving at my flat in San Francisco many years ago (I have a vague feeling that Theo might have been there but I dunno). In some ways it was a sad nerd fest, in other ways it was so cool. I wouldn't trade that for anything, yeah it was nerdy, and yeah it was some dudes hanging out without any girls that we so wanted, but we had fun, it was a good time.

I'm all for thanksgiving being a place where you can hang out with your friends. Lots of people are away from their families, so go gather in the nerds, whatever, gather in the people that you care about. Who you gather is up to you but I'd vote for gathering in the people who are mostly ignored. Lots of them have lots to offer.

Pretty cool and hip till your parents are gone and you wish you'd spent more time with them.

Don't get me wrong, Thanksgiving with friends can be awesome, but you need to make time for family. You can't assume they will always be there.

It's all relative. I live close to my parents, and have the privilege of having dinner with them about once every other week. Meanwhile, if I'm lucky, I get to see my best friend who lives far away once every 6 months. Given this disparity, I would greatly prefer hanging out with my friend during the holidays rather than burning vacation days spending time with my nuclear family (who I see often) and extended family (who I am not close with at all) just because tradition dictates that I should do so.

And that's totally fine - for the past few years we've done friendsgiving the weekend after. That way a lot of friends can make it too. And turkeys are usually on sale if you're into that. And really if everyone pitches in something, it's a pretty darned cost effective meal too.

You also can't assume everyone will want to spend time with their parents. Some people grew up in abusive households. Some families are toxic. People don't spend time with their friends to be "cool and hip" (or if they do, I doubt that qualifies as "friends").

This is more than a bit snarky.

I find traveling home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas is prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire sufficient time off for both from work. I usually opt for taking no time off Thanksgiving week, holding a Friendsgiving, and then being free to spend more days with the fam at Xmas time. Friendsgiving is not always an excuse to avoid family.

Choosing more days on Xmas fits what I said about making time for family.

It must be nice having friends. I don't have friends in the sense that I do things together socially with them. I have acquaintances.

I've thought a lot about friendships in general, and I don't have time to write all that, but I think it boils down to these:

There's (not always, but) often a tangible point where my acquaintances tend to turn into friends. It's usually some bonding experience. We stayed up all night and did X. We drank together and had a heart to heart. We both love doing Y and spent a lot of time doing that. We travelled together. We suffered through college classes. We spent weekends hanging out together. We spent years talking on IRC. Often there's also some something about level of trust. Someone reveals something about themselves. They talk about something personal that they normally wouldn't. Etc. Absent either of those, my acquaintances tend to stay acquaintances.

On the flipside, I've found that keeping around people who don't value you, don't have your best interests at heart or intentionally cause you to feel bad in any way is just a bad idea. Wanting to become better friends doesn't make it so. It's a two sided thing. Really, I love most of my friends and I'd sacrifice much for them, so when it comes to people like this, I don't have time for that shit.

I have a relatively small number of close friends, and I don't get to spend time with all of them all the time. And as time passes and life happens, friendships form and fade (and I find that the good ones can kickstart right back - even years later.) All that is fine and natural.

It's really about mutual happiness, fun and sharing, and the rest doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be complicated.

Hope this helps!

Thank you for writing that. I'm going through a rough patch at the moment and you've really given me a moment of clarity. I've realized that there is at least one person in my life that I should be considering a friend which I didn't previously, and one friend who I should really downgrade to an acquaintance.

If you ever find the time to write down more of your thoughts about friendships I'd definitely be interested in reading them.

I struggle to make new friends. The standard advice seems to be to go to meetups, do volunteering, and join sports clubs. I've tried those and can't get them to work for me. There's something more to it than just being in attendance.

I think you're definitely right about that tangible point where things change, and I never manage to quite get there. I don't know if that tipping point is something you can instigate or if you just have to leave it to chance.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but how many friends you do or don't have is entirely up to you.

I'm an introvert and it is tough meeting people. I'm not saying it is easy to move out of your comfort zone, but it is necessary. If you want to be more social and have more friends, then make conscious effort be more social and make more friends.

... says the non-married person who doesn't have full-time kids.

Become friends with your kids' friends' parents.

For the record, I am happily married with no kids.

Just to be clear, both of those things are choices one makes, not excuses to be made.

I don't know why I was being quite so aggressive when I wrote that. I'm sorry... I think I was taking frustration out on you when you had nothing to do with it.

I still disagree with the assertion that "how many friends you do or don't have is entirely up to you". It may be true in some extremely narrow sense, but if it came down to it how many people would give up the spouse they love because they were the problem, or their children because they were, or drop everything and move to where people were more similar to themselves?

> I'm not trying to be a jerk, but how many friends you do or don't have is entirely up to you.

Right, because someone with no friends probably have never thought or believed that it is their own fault for being shy/uninteresting/boring (and that they're shy/uninteresting/boring in part because ... they have no friends). It has probably never crossed their mind at all.

> I'm an introvert and it is tough meeting people. I'm not saying it is easy to move out of your comfort zone, but it is necessary. If you want to be more social and have more friends, then make conscious effort be more social and make more friends.

In order to be social, you need to try to be social. Right.

I think what he's saying (which I kinda agree with) is that you have to treat it as actually something that you have to work at, rather than it coming naturally.

So he's not saying that you 'have to try and be social', he's saying 'work at it'. That means doing things that you may not want to do right now, to pay-off later.

> I think what he's saying (which I kinda agree with) is that you have to treat it as actually something that you have to work at, rather than it coming naturally.

Who believes that there are any alternatives? Shy people and people with social anxiety (etc.) don't have a reputation for spontaneously becoming outgoing and so on.

Well this is the problem of about 90% of the geek population : having the skills to understand machines / code leave you with less brain power for social interactions.

For me it would not be a problem if I could just resolve the female companionship problem (or lack thereof). I'm not even shy, it just seems that if I don't pay them women tend to ignore me ...

Start picking up and putting down heavy objects and remember to do something with your hair in the morning.

I know the feeling. The only friends of mine that I'd choose to spend time with outside of work... I know from work.

So...have you tried asking them if they want to do something outside work?

Yes, we do stuff outside work somewhat often. Sorry, that comment was poorly-worded.

I never held Thanksgiving in particularly high esteem, and used to think of it as just the more minor holiday before Christmas, but over the years it has grown a lot in significance for me. I've been doing "Friendsgiving" for many years now, but I didn't start doing it because of any kind of convenience or difficulty with family. In my case, it was born out of necessity.

I live in Los Angeles, which attracts a lot of young people with a lot of different dreams. The reality is that with the combination of only a small amount of vacation time we receive in the US, living a long distance from family, and not having enough money, it often means that you can't go back for all of the holidays and need to prioritize. For me, since my hometown high school friends all went back around Christmas, I chose that time to spend with family. Since we were stuck here in the new city, we decided to have a Thanksgiving and jokingly referred to it as something like "Thanksgiving for the displaced youth of Los Angeles." It turned out that a lot of people we knew here were in the same situation, because turnout was good. I'm also fortunate to have friends from all over the world, and since it isn't an international holiday they didn't have much reason to return home.

We continue to grow closer as a group every year, and as people have brought their friends we have made new friends too. It has gone from something we did because we were all stuck in the same place together to something that we actually seek out and look forward to. Now we even have friends come in from thousands of miles away who have since moved to other cities or even out of the country.

Now I can afford to go back for Thanksgiving, but I don't see myself doing it. It's not that I don't cherish the time I spend with family, but now I also have a holiday which, previously an afterthought, is a very important day when I get to spend time with people I deeply care about.

From my time in Seattle, Friendsgiving and Friendsmas was probably the best feature of American culture that I experienced. I lived in the University District, and my future wife was in graduate school at the University of Washington. There was always somebody around at holiday times so rather than than sit around thinking about why they were not on a plane going home it was time to get on the phone and get cooking. Even when going to the homes of almost complete strangers it was always an enjoyable occasion. Lots to drink always helped but the lack of family-related stress while not being alone was a big part too for which many people were quite grateful.

I would rather celebrate Festivus instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festivus

Featuring the Airing of Grievances, Feats of Strength, an aluminum pole, Festivus dinner, and more!

A festival for the rest of us!

We're doing our first Friendsgiving this year, tomorrow actually. Still plan on seeing the folks on Thanksgiving Day, but it's excuse to have a party and hang out with the people that are close to us. Should be fun :)

I'm glad we've re-appropriated this holiday to celebrate friendship. My friends are just as big a part of me as my own family.

I think these type of things are going to continue to grow. As people become more mobile and move around the country, to get together for holidays they have to travel. And travel has become increasingly painful, especially around holidays. Between the TSA, flight delays, and uncomfortable seats, I've cut down on my air travel quite a bit.

This article aggravates me. My problem with it is more than just the lackluster content or the lack of relevance to this site. My problem with this article is that I know a group of people who have a celebration just like this. The only difference is that they do it because they have lost their family that they would spend this time with.

The two concepts aren't mutually exclusive. For the past couple of years, we've invited both my wife's family (who live in the same city as us) and a bunch of our friends over. It's worked out great. Our kids get tons of other kids to play with, we get to spend time with friends and family, and it's a lot more lively than it would be with just the older family folks there.

Not very new (at least a decade old) but it's a good thing to publicize.

I do this at Xmas - since my parents split acrimoniously, it was too difficult to do a 'family' holiday. So I see both a weekend around Xmas, then have friends over for Xmas - other people with split families, Aussies and Kiwis who can't get home this year etc. It beats a family Xmas hands down.

(British here, so no Thanksgiving)

Doing friendsgiving a couple of days after thanksgiving. This way we can get more friends to come together :-).

We've been doing this for years, though less so since we've had our own children and it's become easier to convince extended family to visit us. Friendsgiving parties are waaaaaaaaay better than family Thanksgivings!

Our friendsgiving was 45 people this year. 3 turkeys, and everyone brought at least a dish. Lots of fun. We did mini pineapple upside-down cakes and somehow the only corn dish, scalloped corn.

And there are many many similar celebrations held the weekends surrounding Thanksgiving, so larger groups can attend.