“Thanksgiving has become an anchor date when we try, as much as we can, to be together”
FOR most Americans, Thanksgiving Day is not just a long weekend or a sale season.
It is the holiday that gathers families back home—sometimes across thousands of miles—around a shared table, a shared memory, and a shared sense of gratitude.
In many ways, it is to the United States what Christmas is to us Filipinos: a season, not just a date; a feeling, not just a ritual.
As a Filipino migrant with Tess by my side, two nurse-children now settled in America, three grandchildren growing up in California, and relatives clustered mostly around the Bay Area, I have seen up close how Thanksgiving has become an important chapter in our own family story.
A long history of gratitude
Thanksgiving in the US traces its roots to early colonial times.
The most famous story is the 1621 harvest feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where English Pilgrims and Wampanoag Native Americans shared a meal after a bountiful harvest, following a brutal first year marked by hunger and disease.
That three-day feast—simple, fragile, and imperfect as it was—became the seed of what is now a national tradition.
Over time, various colonies and states held their own thanksgiving observances, often tied to harvests, victories, or the end of difficult seasons.
It was only in 1863, at the height of the American Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to be observed every last Thursday of November, describing it as a time to give thanks even amid the nation’s wounds.
Later, in 1941, the US Congress formally set the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day.
So it is a holiday born from hardship and hope—much like many of our own Philippine traditions that sprang from colonization, wars, disasters, and the stubborn Filipino will to survive.
Thanksgiving: America’s Christmas
In the Philippines, if you ask people what is the most important holiday, the answer is often automatic: Christmas.
We stretch Christmas farther than any other nation—starting as early as September, with the iconic Jose Mari Chan’s floating carols floating from sari-sari stores and malls, and ending well after New Year.
Christmas here is family, faith, and fiesta rolled into one.
In America, that central emotional spot largely belongs to Thanksgiving.
Yes, Christmas is celebrated in the US, but Thanksgiving carries a special weight.
It is when college students fly home, workers brave crowded airports and highways, and the whole country seems to move in one direction: going home, going back to family, going back to the table.
The rituals are familiar now even to us who grew up thousands of miles away: the roasting of the turkey, the centerpiece of the meal; mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie; Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York; American football games on TV; and, in recent years, the frenzy of Black Friday sales the day after.
But at its core, Thanksgiving is about pagpapasalamat—gratitude. It is a day to pause and count blessings, something very close to the Filipino heart.
How Fil-Ams have embraced Thanksgiving
Filipino Americans—our “kababayans” in the US—have taken Thanksgiving to heart.
Like all other migrants, they adapt to the traditions of their new home, but put a distinctly Filipino spin on the celebration.
In many Fil-Am homes, the turkey doesn’t sit alone.
On the same table you will often find lechon or crispy pata, pancit, lumpiang shanghai, adobo, and, of course, rice.
The cranberry sauce might sit beside sawsawan, and the pumpkin pie beside leche flan or buko salad.
It is Thanksgiving, yes—but it’s also, unmistakably, Pinoy handaan.
Our own family is no exception.
With Tess and I shuttling between the Philippines and the US, and our two eldest children working as nurses in America, Thanksgiving has become an anchor date when we try, as much as we can, to be together—physically when possible, virtually when distance gets in the way.
Our three grandchildren—Fil-Am kids who move naturally between English and a few Filipino words—are growing up with turkey and pancit on the same plate.
For them, Thanksgiving is both American and Filipino.
On that day, they thank God for family, school, health, and blessings in the language of their environment—yet the spirit of “salamat po” remains deeply Filipino.
(The writer, president/chief executive officer of Media Touchstone Ventures, Inc. and president/executive director of the Million Trees Foundation Inc., a non-government outfit advocating tree-planting and environmental protection, is the official biographer of President Fidel V. Ramos.)
