What did you talk about at your Thanksgiving dinner?
 
A week after the celebration of the most American holiday, many people are still digesting dinner table conversations that might have wandered into current events. Whether they were contentious, or affirming, the Thanksgiving dinner table conversation as a reflection of our cultural moment has become a motif in popular culture. A survey of some of the most iconic enactments of the holiday meal in film and in television go some way toward putting last week’s conversations in context.
 
Unlike any other religious or secular American celebration, Thanksgiving offers a motif that resonates with nearly all American audiences, as Norman Rockwell shows in his iconic 1943 portrait of a family celebrating the holiday. The title of the painting is Freedom From Want; it is one in a series inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, Four Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear), which he delivered shortly after the United States entered World War Two. Rockwell’s all-American family would, one hopes, look quite different today; but the propaganda potential is the same – almost everyone celebrates Thanksgiving, in similar ways, with similar cultural cues and breaks from the workweek.