By Stephen P. White.

Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday. No other holiday captures so well the history, temperament, and aspirations of this nation. The distinctive traditions of Christmas, for example - the tree, the carols, Santa Claus - are decidedly, and charmingly, Old World traditions.

The Fourth of July is a riot of fireworks and barbecues and captures well the rebellious spirit that has always marked the American character. But most countries celebrate a national day, and many follow our precedent by having it coincide with the anniversary of their own national independence. We Americans have turned Halloween into a commercial juggernaut (very American, that) but the celebration of All Hallows Eve is another European hand-me-down.

There is some dispute as to which band of Protestant emigres celebrated the first Thanksgiving. The passengers of the ship Margaret landed in what is now Virginia in late 1619 and promptly offered solemn thanks to God for their safe passage. That's all meet and just, but for a proper Thanksgiving setting, give me autumn in New England over December in the Virginia Tidewater.

For most of us, Thanksgiving began with the 1621 celebration of a good harvest by the Pilgrims and their Native neighbors near Plymouth, Massachusetts. Presumably, they ate roast turkey, with sage and apple stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes (no marshmallows, thank you), and cranberry sauce out of a can, just as God intended. Dinner was served at about four in the afternoon, just after the Lions game. The turkey, according to historians, was dry.

If food is the matter of the Thanksgiving holiday, then gratitude is its form. This is not always obvious, despite the holiday's rather unambiguous name. I celebrated Thanksgiving in London once, many years ago, and learned a few things from the experience. One was that it was surprisingly difficult to find canned pumpkin in London for the requisite pie.

Another thing I learned was that many non-Americans (at least the ones I knew) genuinely thought the day was intended as a celebration of gluttony and excess, as though the day had been named ironically and we Americans were just rubbing our bounty in everyone else's faces by stuffing our own.

A third thing I learned was that Americans can be somewhat naive about how our own earnestness is perceived abroad.

My London friends were set straight in the end, I'm happy to say. Another American and I prepared a traditional Thanksgiving feast with all the sides and fixings. We even found the pumpkin we needed for the pie. The story of the Pilgrims' gratitude was recounted, to the surprise and pleasure of our fellow diners, and by the end of the meal everyone agreed that Thanksgiving was a delightful holiday and not at all what they had expected.

The turkey was, I'm sorry to report, a bit dry.

Gratitude, as I said, is the form of the holiday. And gratitude is best demonstrated when the cause of our gratitude is shared widely. This is another thing our Thanksgiving gets right. We don't just thank God for his blessings, we pass them around the biggest table we can find. The significance of sharing our blessings as an expression of gratitude comes home most poignantly when times are hardest.

(I will be celebrating Thanksgiving this year with my in-laws; the first Thanksgiving since my father-in-law died this spring. His absence will be felt all the more acutely for it being Thanksgiving. There will be some tears, no doubt. But I am also sure that this year, both despite our loss and because of it, our celebration will bring an unusually abundant harvest of gratitude.)

Thanksgiving was proclaimed a national holiday, to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November, by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. Amidst unprecedented bloodshed and a fractured Union, Lincoln exhorted all Americans to offer thanks to God for the countless, unmerited blessings he had bestowed...