Thanksgiving can be a complicated holiday here in America. For many, it’s a day of gratitude, connection, and familiar rituals; for others, it carries the weight of history, mythmaking, and stories that have been smoothed over until they no longer resemble the truth.
The holidays arrive as a season of gathering for some, a warm anticipation of family and tradition, while for others it sharpens the quiet ache of the loved ones who are no longer here to share the table.
I’ve been thinking about this duality lately. It’s a tension between celebration and clarity, and I found myself turning, as usual, to the Pre-Raphaelites.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were many things. Rebels, idealists, dreamers. But above all, they were committed to seeing clearly.
They painted nature not as polite background decoration but as something fierce, vivid, and honest. Every leaf in Ophelia, every seed Proserpine‘s pomegranate, every folded petal in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s luminous portraits was rendered with an almost devotional attention.
For Pre-Raphaelite artists, beauty was not an escape from truth but a companion to it.
It strikes me that this approach might serve us well during Thanksgiving.
Rather than mythologizing the holiday, perhaps we can approach it the way the Pre-Raphaelites tried to approach the world around them:
with honesty, reflection, and a desire to see clearly.
Seeing clearly doesn’t mean rejecting the comfort of the day. It simply means holding the whole picture, with its history, its contradictions, its beauty, as an invitation to pause.
It means acknowledging that gratitude and grief often share the same table.
Giving ourselves permission to feel the complexity of the season without flattening it to a single, tidy story.
And once we do that, we can practice a deeper gratitude. One that isn’t performative or perfunctory, but real:
Appreciation for the people who gather with us, whether in the flesh or in memory.
Gratitude for the small, ordinary beauties that sustain us.
Thankfulness for the true, complicated, and human stories that broaden our empathy and connect us to others across time and distance.
In this way, Thanksgiving can become less of a myth and more of a moment: a quiet place to stand, much like the figures in Millais’ Autumn Leaves, watching the old year burn down into embers and letting ourselves feel both the melancholy and the hope of what comes next.
This year, I’m choosing a Pre-Raphaelite Thanksgiving, not in decoration, but in spirit.
I want to move through the holiday with openness, clarity, and a willingness to sit with complexity, to notice the beauty in the smallest details, and to approach the day with artfulness, intention, and a kind of gentle, honest reverence.
May your Thanksgiving be whatever you need it to be this year:
a gathering, a pause, a healing, a remembering.
I pray it will be full of truth, tenderness, and the courage to see clearly.
And may you find, as the Pre-Raphaelites so often did, that honesty and beauty are never at odds. They illuminate each other, even in the deepest season of the year.