Three Insane Films That Kind of Count as Thanksgiving Movies

Stephanie Weber
10 min readNov 24, 2020
THE Thanksgiving film you all know and love. Amateurs.

I’ve always thought it was weird that there aren’t that many Thanksgiving movies. It’s one of the few ubiquitous American holidays — every American celebrates it no matter what race, religion, gender, sexuality, occupation or star sign they are. So then why don’t we have the same wealth of Thanksgiving media that we do for a religious holiday like Christmas?

Yes, Thanksgiving whitewashes the very real and horrendous Native American genocide that European settlers brought with them to America and we do not do much (or anything, really) as a culture to reckon with that. We barely learned about the many atrocities committed against Native American people in the public school I went to in an area originally settled by the Potawatomi and Miami tribes which WE NEVER EVEN ONCE LEARNED. I HAD TO LOOK THAT UP LATER IN LIFE! This is all to say, I get those reasons for a lack of light-hearted celebration surrounding Thanksgiving. But, by that same token, Christians brought the world the crusades, countless wars, and Joel Osteen and yet we all love Elf.

Maybe another reason for the lack of Thanksgiving movies is that they all feel the same — which is a lazy excuse. Yes, the holiday itself is about cooking and eating dinner with a big group of people. It’s not like there are other traditions to mine from. We don’t sing…

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Stephanie Weber
Stephanie Weber

Written by Stephanie Weber

Stephanie is a writer and comedian whose work has been featured on Reductress, Slate, The Weekly Humorist, The AV Club, Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura and more.

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