How Thanksgiving 2025 Looks Around Here
We show up for one another because it's the right thing to do.
“It is in the shelter of each other that people live.” - Irish proverb
One of the things I try to express to people is how good it feels to give without coming across as, well, an annoyingly pious person. If I am being honest, giving is kind of an addictive high and one that has me question how much of my own desire to give is self-serving but if it makes the world a better, softer place, does it really matter?
Giving doesn’t have to be material, of course. It can be a kind, genuine compliment. It can be offering to take someone’s shopping cart so they don’t have to bring it back. It can be the gift of your attention and listening to someone who needs it. It could be shoveling someone’s sidewalk. A refrain that pops into my head at least once a week when I am feeling like I am not doing enough for myself or others is “little things are big”. If you will only give credence to huge, life-changing things that are out of reach for most of us, imagine how many opportunities you are letting slip through your fingers. Think of some of the most meaningful times when someone’s kindness made your life appreciably better. It is often as simple as a friend letting you know that they are thinking of you.
As I am writing this, I am thinking specifically about our food pantry, the Little Free Plant-Powered Pantry, and our successful fundraiser this year to bring full Thanksgiving* meals to 33 families, or 132 free meals, as each box contains four full dinners. This is obviously a material giving that needed to be fundraised, priced out, coordinated and promoted, but giving is giving. It all matters to someone. My community stepped up to support this effort in a major way and it would not have happened without their generosity. Honestly, given the need, it is a drop in the bucket, but we have to do what we can because it matters to the people whose lives we have helped.
When I first put it out there and started receiving requests for boxes this year, I noticed something interesting about the people who reached out to me. In addition to the gratitude and relief of knowing that they didn’t have to worry about this single meal, one consistent aspect is that they nearly all wanted to tell me why they were in a place of requesting this meal. I didn’t get the sense that it was to justify their need or due to embarrassment, but simply to share the circumstances that brought them to me, not that I asked. They wanted someone to hear them.
We know that almost all of us are a difficult month or two, or some sudden bad news – a job loss, an illness, a divorce, a parent who is in need – from being in a place of real vulnerability. With the U.S. government cutting the social safety nets that have helped this country and leveled the playing field a bit, it is only going to get worse, no matter how prepared and responsible you think you are.
Here are some of the people I’ve been talking to this week who requested Thanksgiving meals: Two people reached out to me for different neighbors who are afraid to leave their home due to ICE. One woman I have been talking to has cancer and is deep in medical debt but cannot go back to work until she is done with her treatment, if everything goes well. Another woman in her 70s is the full-time caregiver for a relative’s children as their mother is in the throes of a drug addiction. Two people reached out to me on behalf of their senior parents, who are stretched especially thin this year. A few mentioned that they have not received their full SNAP benefits and are struggling to pay bills. Two mentioned that they have been looking for work for months without success. One woman has a son who is terminally ill and lives with her but she cannot leave him for long.
They are all so grateful that one meal is accounted for, and, beyond that, knowing that people in their community care about them.
My situation was different but also so similar. Two years after my son was born, my husband’s good-paying job disappeared shortly after we bought our first house, unknowingly right before the housing bubble burst. Concurrent to this, my mother, a widow, started to decline in her mid-50s; ultimately she was diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia as well as Parkinsonism. Over time, we became her caregivers. During this same period, seismic shifts were happening in my husband’s field of art direction, when everyone with a nephew who had some graphic design programs could slap together a decent enough logo and it was hard to convince people to pay a professional from an advertising background a fraction of the rate he had once easily commanded. My own career as a freelance writer was unpredictable and jobs were not consistent. Trusted clients we’d each been working with would fall off the face of the map, no doubt also drowning in the same financial crisis.
It was a lot, let’s just say that. We were lucky enough to not slip through the cracks because we could barely scrape by, but that was it. The idea of a nest egg quickly became a joke. If one more emergency from left field had hit us, we could have easily been homeless. As it was, our car – an expensive lemon – died in a parking lot one day and there was no resuscitating it or even towing it. We literally walked away. We had razor-thin margins with no room for error and certainly no indulgences for years. Every expense had to be justified for and, damn, it was so harrowing sometimes. The anxiety of that time is permanently embedded in my nervous system. I don’t know if I will ever lose the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop, no matter how far I get from it in terms of time and circumstances. I still wake up in a panic, to be honest, and I have to talk myself off the ledge. I have moved on but my nervous system is still shot.
There are always extenuating circumstances as to why someone is in a place of need. Anyone who thinks this cannot happen to them either has a trust fund and plenty of generational wealth, strong safety nets or a lack of imagination.
There is so much shame in our country thanks to the entrenched attitude of rugged individualism that is still stitched through our society and empty platitudes about bootstrapping as if we all were given the same advantages and disadvantages, as if it’s not largely a fiction to justify the worst, most dehumanizing and dishonest aspects of capitalism.
I don’t mean to bring this to a dark place. We did something good here. My community came together and we are giving 33 families 132 complete meals of delicious food. But after months of the Trump administration declaring open season on poor people, especially people of color, I want to remind us that we are all so close to peril. The government is not going to help us. Let’s disabuse ourselves of that fairytale. We can, however, come together for one another. We are all tied together, more now than ever. We can show up for one another with understanding, without conditions, a transactional attitude or judgments. Lean times and tragic events can happen, with or without our consent.
Let’s get used to helping each other and deriving joy from that. The cliché is true: We are all in this together.
Thank you so much to those who made this possible, the generous donors in our community and Soul Veg City for donating so many delicious vegan roast slices with gravy. Oh, also, I’ll say it again: Little things are big.
* I know not everyone loves the tradition of Thanksgiving for good reasons. Feel free to reframe this as a meal.