A Southern reflection on gratitude, gathering, and the complicated country I still love

Ask me what cultural traditions I love about my country, and my heart answers before my head can get its shoes on. It says Sunday dinner. It says Thanksgiving. It says the Fourth of July, family recipes, front-porch stories, children running in and out of screen doors, and the holy sound of people laughing around a table.

But these days, that question also leaves me sitting with a harder truth. I love this country, but I am troubled by some of the ideas it is wading through. The notion that “illegal immigrants” should simply be shipped away, tossed out, and treated as if they do not belong in a nation built and shaped by immigrants is not only unsettling—it is absurd. And I believe more of us feel that way than the loudest voices would have you know.

American culture has never been one clean thread. It is a quilt—stitched from Indigenous heritage, regional differences, and the customs brought here by people from all over the world. Some patches are beautiful. Some are painful. Some were sewn on with hands that were welcomed, and others with hands that were pushed aside. Still, together, they made something unmistakably ours.

I am Southern as sweet tea and grits, and I say that with love. I come from Sunday dinners after church, when the family gathered not because a calendar invite told us to, but because that is what families did. There was food, conversation, and the comfort of simply being together. My childhood was filled with those Sundays, and I am grateful for every one of them.

I tried to give that same gift to my children and then to their children. For a while, I did. But life has a way of scattering people. Work schedules stretch. Kids grow up. Families move in different directions. The world gets busy, then busier, and before long the table that once held everybody has empty chairs—not because there is no love, but because time keeps running ahead of us.

Of all the American traditions, Thanksgiving may be the one that most clearly carries both my affection and my ache. We are taught that it began with a shared harvest meal between Indigenous people and English colonists—a moment of help, gratitude, and food passed between different worlds. But that story, as neat as it is on a paper placemat, cannot hold the whole truth. What followed was not lasting harmony. It was greed, expansion, broken promises, and the devastating loss of Native lives, land, and culture.

Still, I hold on to what Thanksgiving could mean at its best: a gathering, a pause, a meal made from memory, and a chance to say, “We made it through another year.” President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving in 1863, during the Civil War, calling the country toward gratitude and healing when it was deeply divided. Maybe that is why the day still matters to me. Not because history is simple, but because the need for unity, humility, and thankfulness is still painfully alive.

For me, Thanksgiving is not just turkey and dressing, though I will not pretend those do not matter. Food carries memory, it is a love language in itself. Recipes become a family language. A dish made the same way for generations can say what words sometimes cannot, such as… You belong here. You are loved. Sit down and eat. It is a day that feeds not only my hunger but my soul, my heart.

The Fourth of July is another tradition I connect with this country, though it too asks us to hold pride and honesty in the same two hands. There is something stirring about fireworks, flags, music, and neighbors gathered under a summer sky. But freedom is not merely something we celebrate with sparklers and barbecue. Freedom is something we are responsible for expanding, protecting, and telling the truth about.

Most of the traditions we call “American” did not arrive here fully formed. They came with us, whoever “us” happened to be in that generation and then they changed and evolved. They blended with place, weather, hardship, celebration, language, sorrow, and hope. That is the beauty of culture. It refuses to sit still. It keeps becoming…

So when I think about the cultural traditions of the country I love, I do not think first of grand speeches or polished myths. I think of a crowded table. I think of passing plates. I think of elders telling stories, children half-listening, and someone inevitably asking who made the pie. I think of gratitude that is honest enough to remember the hurt, brave enough to welcome the stranger, and tender enough to keep setting one more place.

That, to me, is the tradition worth saving… not just the holiday itself, but the gathering. Not just the food, but the fellowship. Not just the country we inherited, but the kinder one we still have the power to make.