Overview
Thanksgiving, the holiday when we come together as a family and celebrate what it means to be thankful for what you have and who you’re surrounded by in life, but to some people they believe that the holiday has fizzled out in recent years. While that may be opinion-based, we could also see statistically if Thanksgiving has lost some spirit.
Older vs. Newer Generations
One of the reasons for this feeling could stem from the classic older vs. newer generation debacle. For the past few years, there has been a rise in children becoming
more indifferent to Thanksgiving, seeing it as a boring holiday, or because they just want Christmas to come sooner. There is another cause for the recent decline in Thanksgiving: the fact that younger generations tend to celebrate Friendsgiving nowadays. Friendsgiving works pretty much the same as Thanksgiving, but instead of family, it’s a group of friends coming together to celebrate. For most of the newer generations, they personally prefer this over regular Thanksgiving due to the lack of stress and more freedom in celebrating.
According to an article from Statistica, Thanksgiving is still the most popular celebration by a landslide, with around 73% of people celebrating Thanksgiving compared to just 20% for Friendsgiving.
Decline in Black Friday
While Black Friday doesn’t fall on Thanksgiving, it is seen as one of the major events in the November Holiday Package. There have been some noticeable changes during this holiday due to the pandemic, the rise of online shopping, and Cyber Monday.
We can easily trace the surge in online shopping to the COVID-19 pandemic, when we all had to go into lockdown and were strongly encouraged not to go outside. This had a significant impact on Black Friday, with statistics from Practical Ecommerce showing that in-person shopping decreased by 52% compared to the previous year. Opposite to this, online shopping increased by 21.6% with a record-breaking 9 billion dollars spent.
This trend has only continued in the years following, where online shopping has outdone in-person by almost double every year, from starting with only a 17% difference in 2021 to a drastic 56% difference in 2024. As for now, we can consider Black Friday in its own dilemma due to the takeover of online shopping.
Television
Keeping on the topic of media, TV has been a staple for Thanksgiving. When everyone is done eating, they most often go into the family room and watch TV, whether it is a Charlie Brown movie or a football game, there is always something on the screen. Now, how has that developed in recent years?
One of the most viewed events on Thanksgiving is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, when floats of your favorite characters take the streets of New York in a joyful celebration. As the years go by, so does the viewership. As of 2024, the parade had a record-breaking 31.3 million views across streaming platforms and cable channels. The NFL hasn’t been doing badly either, as its three consecutive games last Thanksgiving added up to a record-breaking 141 million views, making it the third year in a row where the NFL set a new record for itself. With these astounding numbers, we are shown that television definitely hasn’t lost its spark either.
Conclusion
Well, now we’ve hit a wall; all the evidence collected has proven otherwise to the idea that Thanksgiving lost its spark. So now what? Statistically, Thanksgiving has been doing just fine, even better, in terms of online shopping and television. So could it really just be a feeling? No, in conclusion, Thanksgiving has not lost its spark; the world is just in a transition period of a more modern Thanksgiving, by bringing in new traditions such as Friendsgiving and online shopping. So no, Thanksgiving hasn’t lost its spark; it’s just changing.
