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To be at my house this week was to be in the thick of mid-November energy.

Our kids buzzing because family is flying in. My wife and I racing the clock — cleaning rooms, washing towels, figuring out who’s sleeping where.

Stress wrapped in joy. Joy wrapped in stress.

If your home looks like ours right now — half-folded laundry, Amazon boxes, the fridge filling up — you know exactly what I mean.

And every year it hits me:

Why does the holiday season feel like both a celebration and a performance?

Why do I feel like our joy is somehow tied to how well we execute the rituals?

The food. The setup. The decorations. The shopping. The sales. The schedules.

The “Are we doing this right?”

And that’s when I made a mistake.

I started wondering why my family doesn’t roast a turkey or eat cranberry sauce more often…do we not like these foods outside of Thanksgiving?

And that turned into me downloading the history of how Thanksgiving actually became Thanksgiving.

And now I can’t unsee it…

Thanksgiving sort of seems like an ancient ritual handed down by the Pilgrims, untouched through generations.

Turkey. Cranberries. Thursday.

Family gathered around some manicured table; all the right food and trimmings.

But nearly all of that was constructed, not inherited.

Thanksgiving doesn’t exist for us here in the U.S. because of deep, consistent tradition.

It exists because of mass media, marketing instincts, and our very human desire to be in sync with each other.

A few highlights:

1. The “First Thanksgiving” menu looked nothing like ours.

If there even was a “First Thanksgiving,” the menu was likely:

Turkey became a staple MANY years later because it showed well in a painting.

Fun fact: Nearly all cranberry sales in the U.S. occur just prior to Thanksgiving.

2. The woman who “created” Thanksgiving did it through relentless storytelling.

Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the most widely circulated magazine of the time (and author of Mary Had A Little Lamb 🤷‍♂️) spent 40 years lobbying presidents and governors to make Thanksgiving a national holiday.

Forty years. One person. One letter writing campaign, repeated over and over.

Her work only stuck when Abraham Lincoln needed something — anything — to unify a fractured nation post-Civil War.

3. Norman Rockwell did the rest.

Rockwell’s 1943 “Freedom From Want” painting cemented the mental model of the holiday:

That one image, published in The Saturday Evening Post, standardized Thanksgiving for millions of people who had never celebrated it that way before.

One picture provided the “Oh, this is how it’s supposed to look…” visual that was needed for a new national ritual.

4. Macy’s and marketers filled in the gaps.

The Thanksgiving Day Parade?

Well, that was a marketing stunt designed in 1924 to get Americans into the buying mood right before Christmas.

At the time, retailers like Macy’s had a common problem: they could stock more items than ever before (see industrialized manufacturing,) but they didn’t have enough buyers to buy them.

The vast majority of people only owned a few of any given item, and they held on to those items for a long time — two or three pairs of shoes, a few dresses or pairs of slacks.

There was no “shopping” culture like there is today.

To go out and spend an afternoon buying more stuff wasn’t a common recreational activity.

So Macy’s “borrowed” the idea for the parade from Gimbels, their biggest competitor, and also “borrowed” lions and tigers from the Central Park Zoo — all to let you know it was time to start buying Christmas gifts.

Black Friday?

Not a “tradition” — a phrase that evolved from:

Cyber Monday?

Created in a conference room, launched in 2005.

Designed to accelerate the adoption of online shopping by capitalizing on buyers, still high from weekend sales, returning to offices with high-speed internet connections on Monday.

So what we treat as organic Thanksgiving tradition, was actually engineered to:

A synchronized holiday gives us a synchronized culture.

A synchronized culture creates predictable behavior.

Predictable behavior is very good for business.

Because the holidays are a spotlight on something we’ve talked about all year long:

The power of stories to influence our behavior.

Stories we inherit…and stories we choose to create, and share. [ahem marketing 🤔]

Because humans are social creatures. We want to belong. We want to feel in sync with our people.

Marketers know this.

Media knows this.

Culture-makers know this.

And every November, those instincts get amplified.

Holiday campaigns, flash sales, Giving Tuesday, curated tablescapes, “perfect host” TikTok’s, endless urgency — all of it is designed to pull the same psychological levers we’ve been exploring together:

None of this is inherently bad, and I’m not trying to submit some sort of “Get off my lawn” style gripe, or grievance.

But these things become invisible over time unless we look closely.

And once you see it, something shifts.

Not your behavior, necessarily — but your awareness.

This isn’t a call to ditch tradition.

This isn’t anti-holiday or anti-commerce.

It’s just an invitation to notice:

What parts of the season feel meaningful…and what parts feel inherited without question?

When you understand the machinery behind some of our cultural defaults, you reclaim something that really matters: Agency.

Not “Do Thanksgiving differently.”

Not “Ignore Black Friday.”

Not “Break your rituals.”

Just:

See the design.
See the incentives.
See the stories you’ve been handed.

Because once you can see them, you get to decide which ones you keep…and which ones you remix.

Whether you’re traveling, hosting, or doing a small dinner at home — here’s something worth considering:

Being in-sync is wonderful.
Commerce is part of the deal.
But neither should run on autopilot.

We don’t choose most of the stories we grow up inside of.

But as adults — as creators, builders, parents, leaders — we have the ability to revise them.

To keep the ones that give us meaning.

And leave the ones that don’t.

That’s a pretty good tradition in my opinion.

Happy early Thanksgiving my friend.

I’m thankful you’re here.

~ Jaime

P.S. If any of this sparked a thought or reaction, or you’d like to send feedback my way, hit ‘reply’ — I love hearing from you, and I read every message.