Thanksgiving Eve is Millennials’ Last Remaining Societal Contribution
Our last nice thing is a celebration of the fact that we can’t have nice things
In terms of quantity, American Millennials have given much to the world — Facebook, avocado toast, Gaga, participation trophies, grown men who hate participation trophies — but has our brief existence-thus-far really been a net benefit to society?1
A generation must be judged as a whole and alongside each of our positive contributions exists an equally villainous counterpart. For every Taylor-Swift-the-songbird there is a Taylor-Swift-the-climate-nightmare. For every Women’s March, there is a Charlottesville.
Our only unsullied contribution to society occurs once each year, in the form of a holiday we call Thanksgiving Eve on the East Coast and Drinksgiving or Blackout Wednesday in the midwest.2 But what’s in a name, anyway? What I am saying is that for the past decade of our lives, Millennials have imbibed heavily on the night before Thanksgiving with our oldest friends — the people we knew when we were formative, before we went out there into the world.
On Thanksgiving Eve, we tell stories about the things that have happened to us. We drink too much and we look at each other in the face and think about how our faces have changed. Like migratory animals, we return home to remember that we’re still in this together. And, as simple as it is, I like to think Thanksgiving Eve means something. And I like to think we came up with it.
I won’t argue that millennials invented an activity as arbitrary as collective binge drinking on the night before Thanksgiving. But we made it a thing. And because I know this is an outlandish premise, allow me to proffer some proofs:
From a 2017 article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “also referred to as Blackout Wednesday or Black Wednesday, Drinksgiving has likely been around for decades, but it didn’t get much recognition until around 2007, when the catchy term was coined.”
From a 2009 Urban Dictionary entry on Drinksgiving: “the day and night before actual Thanksgiving where you drink and have fun w/ your friends because you'll have to endure family the whole next day.”
From a 2010 Urban Dictionary entry on Blackout Wednesday: “The day before Thanksgiving. This Wednesday is the biggest bar night of the year, therefore you should get blacked out.”
Our ideas and our lives have changed since those Urban Dictionary entries — nearly one in two Millennials are now married. Some of us even have kids of our own. We are adults looking grimly into middle-age. The world is changing: Bill Cosby is evil, pumpkin spice has gotten out of hand and Aaron Carter is dead. Even Thanksgiving Eve is changing.
Six years ago, in my mid-twenties, I rang in the holiday in a dirty townhouse in Wilmington, Delaware. A half-dozen of my closest friends and I stood around a plastic table drinking until we ran out of beer and then we went to the bar and drank until we fell over.
On another Thanksgiving Eve (four years ago), I have a specific memory of smoking a cigar with the same friends in somebody’s Philadelphia kitchen. The lights were too bright and I remember looking at my feet (I was wearing Red Wings and there were at least six of them) and thinking it’s probably good that I don’t drink like this much anymore.
Last year, we went out to our regular bar until it got crowded and then we went back to Joe’s house, made a fire in the wide backyard under the towering pine trees and drank until we fell over — an activity which, with our twenties now behind us, we really cannot do much anymore. But this year, we’ll do the same thing.
What I’m saying is that we do this every year and we call it Thanksgiving Eve on the East Coast and apparently they call it “Blackout Wednesday” in Chicago.3 And no, we haven’t agreed on a name for it yet — we haven’t gotten that far. Without a name, without a hashtag, Thanksgiving Eve has not yet been ruined. And yet, we know it will be. It will be hashtagged, monetized and mass-produced. Even in writing this, I am part of the problem. I am talking about Fight Club.
But the evening hasn’t yet devolved into a marketing ploy. You don’t see vodka billboards (or even YouTube ads) capitalizing on Thanksgiving Eve. There are, as of yet, no big-name streaming comedies built upon the stale premise that this was Thanksgiving Eve and anything could happen.
The general population is aware of Thanksgiving Eve but they don’t understand it. Our mothers know we typically drink too much on the night before Thanksgiving, but they don’t know why. Our mothers don’t understand how Thanksgiving Eve can be special. Of all the wonderful ideas we came up with, it’s one of the last nice things we have left.
Admittedly, we millennials cannot offer much to society. Each time we declare a brilliant notion — cryptocurrency, renaming problematic mascots, whatever it was Elizabeth Holmes said she was doing — it somehow turns out we’re really not as bright as people always told us. And so we offer Thanksgiving Eve, a time when you see those friends whom you haven’t seen in years and that’s really all it is. But isn’t that enough?4
I too hate it when a writer begins a piece with a question (I also hate footnotes, and yet here we are). It stinks of amateurism. I also hate cheap writing that opens with audacious questions like “are we actually doing good things?” But at the same time, I am trying to go from a 30,000-foot view of a generation into an examination of a very specific tradition of that generation. And I am trying to hold both views in mind as I move through this piece. I felt a question was the best way to play this trick — it’s a trick and it’s not — I want to acknowledge both the answer and the question’s absurdity.
I have always known the holiday as Thanksgiving Eve and so that’s what I’ll be calling it in this piece. You may call it what you want, this article is not about the name. In fact, I’d add that the varying nomenclature only adds to the charm — this holiday (Thanksgiving Eve, Drinksgiving, Blackout Wednesday) remains so indie, we haven’t even agreed on a name yet.
For a few years, I believed that Thanksgiving Eve was only a thing among people like my friends — people who grew up around cornfields and duck blinds. People who really went out there into the world. But of course, I was wrong. All around the country, people celebrate in the same way.
If I’m going to be hackish enough open this piece with a question, then dammit, I’m going to be hackish enough to close it with a question too.