Thanksgiving 2020. The one where the CDC told you not to go home.
I don’t know about you, but telling Americans they can’t gather for a holiday built entirely around gathering felt like the cruelest social experiment anyone could have designed. And yet, here we were. Sitting in our separate houses, trying to figure out how to make a turkey for two people feel festive instead of depressing.
Some families did small pods. Some did parking lot drop-offs of foil-wrapped plates. Some put a laptop at the head of the table and pretended that Grandma on a pixelated screen was the same as Grandma in the kitchen yelling about the gravy. It wasn’t. Everyone knew it wasn’t. But we did it anyway because the alternative was nothing.
I film families for a living. Over 700 of them. And Thanksgiving 2020 hit me harder than I expected, because I’d spent years documenting what happens when families actually sit together. I knew, with painful specificity, what people were missing.
They were missing the chaos. The too-many-people-in-one-kitchen energy. The cousins wrestling in the backyard. The aunt who brings the same Jell-O mold every year and gets offended if you don’t eat it. The grandfather who falls asleep in his chair at 3 PM and nobody moves him because he looks so peaceful and also because last time someone tried he swatted at them.
That stuff can’t be Zoomed. It just can’t.
But here’s what I also learned in 2020. Absence teaches you what presence is worth. The families I talked to during that stretch were more awake to what they’d been taking for granted than at any point I could remember. People who hadn’t called their parents in months were suddenly calling every day. People who hadn’t said “I love you” out loud since childhood were saying it at the end of every phone call. Something broke open.
If there’s a silver lining to the worst Thanksgiving in modern American history, it’s this: people remembered that showing up matters. Being in the room matters. The boring, annual, predictable ritual of gathering around a table with the same people and eating the same food matters more than most of us ever admitted.
We came back to the table in 2021. Most of us. And it felt different. Heavier and lighter at the same time.
If this past year taught you anything about the value of your family’s time together, Heritage Films can help you hold onto it. We make documentary films that capture your family exactly as they are, so the people who come after you will know what they came from. yourheritagefilm.com