A Call to Thanksgrieving

An invitation for grief to sit at the table of Thanksgiving.

©Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

November 27, 2025

Every year, as the days thin and the light leans early into evening, we are told the same story. Thanksgiving is for gratitude, for fullness, for gathering around tables that bend under the weight of food and family and “we’re doing just fine.”

But there is another guest hovering at the doorway, barefoot and unsure, holding a plate of memories it does not know where to put.

Grief.

This is a call to Thanksgrieving, a gentle invitation for grief to sit at the table of Thanksgiving, not out back on the porch, not locked in the bedroom, not disguised as “I’m just tired.”

Because for many of us, Thanksgiving is not simple. The empty chair is loud.

The favorite recipe tastes different. The family photo has a missing face, and your heart flinches before you even press the shutter.

The story under the story

There is another reason this day is not simple.

The Thanksgiving many of us were taught in school is a myth that has been sanded smooth. It tells of friendly neighbors sharing a peaceful meal and then quietly steps over land theft, broken treaties, genocide, and the ongoing erasure of Indigenous peoples whose descendants are still here, still singing, still resisting, still grieving.

Long before there was a “Thanksgiving,” this continent was already full of ceremonies of gratitude. The people of this land did not have borders in the way Europe understood them. They had relationships, responsibilities, agreements with one another and with the land itself. Rivers were not “resources,” they were relatives. Corn, beans, and squash were not just crops, they were kin.

So when we speak of Thanksgiving, we are also speaking of a wound.

A holiday that became a kind of national costume over a history of invasion and occupation. For many Indigenous people, this day is not a cheerful harvest, it is a day of mourning, of remembering what was taken and what was never returned.

If we ignore that, our gratitude becomes thin and dishonest.

If we include it, our gratitude becomes more real, more difficult, and more sacred.

Thanksgrieving is what happens when we let all of that pull up a chair too.

We say:

I am grateful, and I am grieving.

I am grateful for my table, and I acknowledge that this table stands on land that remembers other languages, other prayers, other kinds of feasts.

I am grateful for my people, and I honor the peoples who were displaced so that my people could be here at all.

This is not about guilt as performance.

It is about truth as a spiritual practice.It is about remembering that we are guests on a land that had no borders until they were carved into it by force.

So maybe this year, as you set the table, you whisper the name of the Nation whose lands you occupy. Maybe you make a donation to an Indigenous-led organization, or commit to learning from Indigenous voices rather than speaking for them. Maybe you simply pause and say, “This holiday carries harm as well as hope, and I will not pretend otherwise.”

That, too, is Thanksgrieving.

Making room at the table

Thanksgrieving does not ask you to choose between gratitude and sorrow. It knows they are siblings, not enemies. It knows that sometimes the deepest thank you rises right through tears.

Thank you for the years we did have.

Thank you for the way love still lingers in the objects they touched.

Thank you that my heart, though shattered, still beats and still remembers.

Thank you for the original keepers of this land, for their languages, their ceremonies, their resistance, their survival.

You might light a candle at the table this year, a small lantern for the unseen. You might speak a name out loud before the meal, or quietly under your breath. You might cook one dish simply because it was “theirs,” and let yourself cry right into the gravy.

You might also say, in your own words, “I remember that this land had other stories long before mine. I honor those stories and the people who still carry them.”

This is not being negative. This is being whole.

Thanksgrieving says:

• You are allowed to be present with the living and still long for the dead.

• You are allowed to feel gratitude for what you have and sorrow for how it came to be, all in the same breath.

• You are allowed to laugh and then sob and then laugh again, without apology.

When we practice Thanksgrieving, we refuse the lie that we must be “over it” by the time the holidays arrive, whether “it” is a personal grief, a family fracture, or a long history of harm. We stop trying to perform the version of Thanksgiving that fits the greeting card, and instead create a holy, human feast that fits our actual hearts.

Maybe this year your gratitude sounds like, “I am thankful I made it this far.”

Maybe it is, “I am thankful for the one friend who gets it.”

Maybe it is, “I am thankful that Indigenous peoples are still here, still teaching, still singing the land back to itself.”

Maybe it is as simple as, “I am thankful I can feel at all, even when it hurts this much.”

That counts.

So let this be your invitation.

As you set out the plates, set out space for your grief.

As you pass the dishes, pass stories, not only of your own family, but of the deeper history of the ground beneath your feet.

As you bow your head, let your blessing include the ones who are missing, the peoples who were displaced, and the parts of you that are still in pieces.

Welcome, grief. Sit with us.

Welcome, truth. Sit with us.

We will not pretend you are not here.

We will give thanks in your presence, not in your absence.

This is Thanksgrieving, a table big enough for love, for justice, and for remembering...

and gratitude for surviving it all.

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