By Marco Shalma

I came to this country more than twenty years ago with the same starter kit every immigrant arrives with. A heavy accent, a head full of ambition, and zero clue how anything works beyond the subway map. I learned English from landlords, cooks, deli guys, and the people yelling on the A train. I figured out the rules of the city one overdraft fee at a time. And somewhere along the way, I picked up something I didn’t expect: a real, emotional attachment to Thanksgiving.

And I’m not talking about the food. Nobody immigrates here craving dry turkey and cranberry gelatin with the same texture as a failed startup. I’m talking about the one day where America feels like the idea we were promised. The great equalizer. The reset button. The moment where nobody cares where your parents were born or what language you curse in.

Thanksgiving always felt like the only holiday where everyone gets a seat. You didn’t have to belong to a religion. You didn’t have to know the right songs. You didn’t need to pretend you were celebrating the “authentic” version of anything. You just showed up, brought whatever dish your childhood burned into your memory, and sat with people who also wanted a better life. That’s the baseline American experience if you strip all the noise away.

But in the past few years, the noise got louder. Every holiday gets dragged through a moral purity test. Someone always has a post explaining the historical evil of the thing you’re trying to share with your family. Every celebration becomes a battlefield for the most exhausting people in the room. And we lose the point. We forget how messy human history is and how every culture in the world turned trauma into tradition and tradition into community.

So leave Thanksgiving alone. Seriously. We don’t have a lot of universal things left here. Two days a year—Thanksgiving and July 4th—this country actually feels emotionally synced. Old Americans, new Americans, future Americans, all eating, all hoping, all dreaming at the same time. That matters. You don’t have to love the menu. You don’t have to ignore the past. But don’t take away one of the few things that makes this place feel like it still has a heart.