November 25, 2025
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast to hear the Inspired Teaching Team share their unique Thanksgiving Day traditions, from Cajun Mirlitons and Betty Crocker-inspired cuisine to Spades and Tom Hanks movies.
This Thursday, millions of people in the United States will gather with loved ones to celebrate Thanksgiving. They’ll travel cross-country, spend hours basting turkeys (46 million of them), and wait in the cold for the beginning of much-anticipated parades. Many will tune in to watch a football game or two, and many others will online shop to take advantage of increasingly early Black Friday sales.
From what’s on our dinner plates to what’s on our TV screens, Thanksgiving helps to remind us of our commonalities—a welcome and decidedly uncommon thing in today’s divided, polarized society.
There is also much to celebrate in the ways we differ from one another in observing the holiday. Our unique traditions, whether as households or larger communities, highlight the breadth of diversity in the United States and underscore Thanksgiving’s (perhaps mythical, but still aspirational) origin: Authentically connecting and building community with people who are different from us.
Aleta and family posing with their traditional Jell-O mold dish in the foreground.
That includes learning about why some communities may not observe Thanksgiving at all. This past weekend, Washington, DC high school students participated in a Speak Truth session in which they explored who the holiday has traditionally been for, and who it leaves out. As part of this exercise, the students are developing a community food bank map and resource list to support neighbors in the District whose Thanksgivings may look different from many of ours.
Engaging with our history—being curious about why and how we celebrate some elements of our past and not others, and how these legacies impact our lives today—is never more relevant than as we prepare to sit down with loved ones and express our gratitude.
We hope your holiday is filled with opportunities to Be Curious and discover new traditions!
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Hooray For Monday is an award-winning weekly publication of Center for Inspired Teaching, a social change nonprofit organization that champions the power of curiosity and is dedicated to transforming the school experience from compliance-based to engagement-based. Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation-based professional learning for teachers that is 100% engaging – intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
