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Thanksgiving is often cast as a holiday of unity, but it has also become a microcosm of the country’s fractures.
What winds up being served for Thanksgiving dinner, who shows up — or doesn’t — and whether politics gets mentioned, can reflect broader shifts in ideology and culture. Simultaneously, Thanksgiving is still intended to bridge divides and emphasize the magnificence of the great American experiment launched centuries ago.
One example of this is the food Americans choose to eat on Thanksgiving and how they make it.
6 CLASSIC THANKSGIVING SIDE DISHES THAT HAVE DISAPPEARED FROM AMERICAN TABLES
Take-out and dine-in options have become more widely adopted in contemporary Thanksgiving celebrations, with research from restaurant software company Popmenu finding a 42% increase from 2024 in the number of folks who plan to order from, or dine-in at, a restaurant on Thanksgiving. Costs were a primary reason for the shift, along with wanting to spend more time with family and not worry about cooking.
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump pardon the national Thanksgiving turkey Gobble in the Rose Garden of the White House, Nov. 25, 2025. (Evan Vucci/The Associated Press )
The length of time spent at the dinner table can also be quite telling.
In 2018, university researchers analyzed smartphone location data pings and determined that “politically diverse” Thanksgiving dinners tended to be significantly shorter than those dinners involving a family of entirely like-minded individuals. The study, conducted in 2018, showed the average dinner was 30 minutes to 50 minutes shorter at tables full of politically diverse folks, while a study measuring the same thing in 2020 found politically diverse dinners to be about 24 minutes shorter on average.
Meanwhile, other Thanksgiving survey data from 2025, published by YouGov, found that 19% of Democrats expect to have political arguments at the dinner table,…
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