Days of thanksgiving are older than the United States. What is American is making it a national civic habit: stop, eat, and say out loud that the country is a gift as well as a job.
Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation, in the middle of the Civil War, asked the nation to set apart the last Thursday of November. Congress later fixed the fourth Thursday. Perseverance sits at that table: a people who could still give thanks while they were fighting themselves.
Celebrate it without embarrassment. Gratitude is not naivete. It is how a free people remember that the table was paid for by someone else, then pass it on.