Gathering With Intention Honoring History, Sharing Responsibility, and Creating Connection Without Forced Intimacy

In Family Is Sacred, Not Secret, we examined what family is, what families provide, how culture and history shape family life, and what can happen when protection begins to require silence. We also considered the roles people inherit, the responsibilities they carry, and the difference between honoring family and organizing family life around appearances.

Understanding those patterns gives us language for what shaped us.

The next question is: What do we practice when we come together now?

Families and communities gather for many reasons. We celebrate birthdays, holidays, accomplishments, new beginnings, and the lives of people we love. We gather to eat, laugh, remember, exchange updates, meet new family members, reconnect after time apart, and support one another through change.

Some gatherings have been repeated for generations. Others are created because someone decides that the people they care about need another way to remain connected.

Yet gathering does not become meaningful simply because people occupy the same room.

A gathering may be supported by one person’s unrecognized labor. People may arrive out of obligation without knowing why they are coming. Private matters may be raised in front of guests. Familiar roles may return before anyone notices. Traditions may continue even after they have stopped fitting the people expected to participate in them.

Gathering with intention does not mean creating a perfect event or controlling everyone’s experience. It means becoming more conscious of what brings people together, what makes their participation possible, and what the gathering is teaching about connection.

It asks us to consider:

• Why are we gathering?

• What history are we carrying into the day?

• What kind of connection can these relationships honestly hold?

• How will responsibility be shared?

• What does each person need to participate with dignity?

• What do we want to carry forward when the gathering ends?

This article explores those questions through restoration-centered family education. It supports reflection, preparation, and more thoughtful participation in ordinary family and community life. When family contact involves serious safety concerns, ongoing harm, or significant distress, individualized support from a qualified psychotherapist or another appropriate professional may be needed.

An intentional gathering cannot guarantee agreement, closeness, or ease. It can create better conditions for people to arrive, participate, and leave without asking one person to carry the entire experience.

What Are We Gathering For?

Gatherings give us a chance to stay connected to one another’s lives. We may come together to celebrate a birthday, observe a holiday, share a meal, welcome someone new, remember someone we have lost, or simply enjoy one another’s company.

Gathering can also be a time to check in. When people have not seen one another for a while, they may share what has changed, what they have been working on, and where life has taken them. Children can talk about what they are learning and how they are growing. Adults can speak about their own changes, goals, accomplishments, and transitions.

Not every update will be joyful. Sometimes people gather because someone needs support, a situation needs clarity, or the family or community is moving through a difficult season. A meaningful gathering can hold celebration and sadness. It can offer connection, encouragement, shared presence, and restoration.

The purpose does not have to be complicated. Sometimes it is simply to spend time together and enjoy each other’s company. Family researchers distinguish routines—repeated practices—from rituals that carry shared meaning. That meaning can help a gathering create continuity across time (Fiese et al., 2002). What matters is understanding why people are coming together.

When people continue gathering only because it is expected, the experience can begin to feel passive or stagnant. Someone may attend physically while remaining emotionally disengaged. They may arrive already resentful, become irritated when asked to take on additional responsibilities, or leave wondering why they spent their time there.

Without intention, a gathering can also become organized around circulating stress rather than offering connection, clarity, support, or restoration. People may repeat the same difficult conversations, exchange frustrations, or focus almost entirely on what isn't going well, without anyone feeling clearer or more supported afterward.

This does not mean every gathering must remain cheerful. It also doesn't mean you must withhold difficult news until a more convenient time. Sometimes something unexpected has happened, and the people gathered naturally shift toward offering support.

The concern is when every gathering becomes the primary place to release difficult information held for months, especially when no one knew this was the conversation they were arriving to have. If this becomes a pattern, the family may need more consistent ways to communicate, check in, and address important matters outside of celebrations and shared meals.

Gathering with intention does not guarantee that everyone will arrive in the same mood or want the same experience. It does give each person an opportunity to consider how they are entering the space.

Before attending or planning a gathering, it may help to ask:

• Why are we gathering?

• What does this gathering mean to me?

• How am I feeling before I arrive?

• What am I hoping to contribute or experience?

• What kind of connection is realistic within these relationships?

• What am I genuinely available for today?

• What is the history of this gathering, and what expectations tend to come with it?

Checking in with yourself beforehand can help you remember how you felt before entering the room. If you arrive feeling peaceful, joyful, or excited and encounter a more strained emotional climate, you do not have to automatically absorb it or organize yourself around it. You can notice what is present while remaining connected to your own emotional state and the reason you chose to attend.

Intention is not about controlling everyone’s behavior or creating a perfect gathering. It is about knowing why you are participating and deciding how you want to show up.

The Holiday We Inherited and the Gathering We Choose

Many Americans were taught that Thanksgiving began when English colonists and Indigenous people came together for a peaceful meal in 1621. The image is familiar: two groups of people who did not know one another shared food, formed a bond, and created a tradition that eventually became Thanksgiving.

That version combines separate parts of history into one simplified national story.

A harvest gathering did take place in 1621 on Wampanoag land at Patuxet. Wampanoag people and English colonists were present, but they did not call the gathering the “First Thanksgiving.” The United States did not yet exist, and the gathering did not establish the national holiday Americans observe today. The relationship between the Wampanoag and English colonists was also more complicated than the peaceful classroom image suggests. Their interactions involved diplomacy, political strategy, cooperation, expanding colonial settlement, land loss, conflict, and violence (Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, n.d.-a, n.d.-b).

The national Thanksgiving holiday developed much later.

For many years, different states and communities observed their own days of thanksgiving at different times. Sarah Josepha Hale, an editor, writer, and advocate for women’s education, spent decades campaigning for one shared national observance. Through her editorials and letters to political leaders, she promoted a day centered on gratitude, family reunion, and national unity.

In September 1863, while the country was divided by the Civil War, Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln and asked him to establish an annual Thanksgiving as a “National and fixed Union Festival” (Hale, 1863, p. 1). She believed that observing the same day throughout the country could create a sense of moral and social reunion among the states.

Lincoln issued the proclamation a few days later. It called the nation to gratitude during a period of tremendous loss, but it did not ask people to ignore the suffering around them. The proclamation also recognized widows, orphans, mourners, and others affected by the war. It called for humility, care, peace, and healing within a divided nation (Lincoln, 1863).

That history gives Thanksgiving a different meaning.

The national observance was not originally established to remember one harmonious meal in 1621. It took root during one of the most divided periods in the country’s history, when reunion and healing were deeply needed. As the holiday became more established, the earlier Plymouth harvest gathering was reshaped into a distinctly American origin story and eventually taught as the “First Thanksgiving” (National Archives Museum, n.d.).

For many of us, learning history can feel like looking at Swiss cheese. We recognize the general shape of what we were taught, but important parts are missing. Those missing pieces change how we understand the whole story.

Historical honesty does not require us to remove gratitude, joy, food, or family connection from the day. It asks us to stop treating an incomplete story as the whole truth. We can acknowledge the Wampanoag people, recognize that Indigenous traditions of gratitude existed long before English settlement, and tell the truth about the harm that followed colonization. We can also recognize that the national holiday was developed much later as an attempt to create shared observance during a divided time.

Once we understand that history, we can decide what the gathering will mean now.

A family may choose to call it Thanksgiving, a gratitude dinner, a family reunion, or something entirely its own. The date may remain useful because schools, workplaces, and other institutions are closed, giving people a shared opportunity to travel and spend time together. The meaning, however, does not have to remain unexamined.

Families might begin with prayer, a moment of remembrance, or an acknowledgment of what has been lost and what remains. They might express gratitude, share family updates, eat together, dance, tell stories, play games, and make room for children and adults to talk about what has changed in their lives. They may also decide how to share food preparation, cost, hosting, transportation, and cleanup.

The historical call for healing does not mean that a present-day gathering must become a family healing session. People may experience restoration simply by being welcomed, laughing together, eating a familiar meal, reconnecting after time apart, or creating a new memory. Healing may occur, but it does not have to become the announced topic or expectation.

If two family members have an unresolved concern, a holiday gathering may not be the appropriate time to address it. People arriving for food, rest, celebration, and connection should not be unexpectedly pulled into a conversation that requires privacy, preparation, consent, or more time than the gathering can responsibly hold.

Gathering with intention can support continuity of connection. It gives people an opportunity to return, learn what has changed, enjoy one another’s presence, and remember that the relationship still exists. It does not require everyone to agree, disclose private experiences, or repair every difficulty while they are together.

We inherit the date and the histories attached to it. We still get to choose what we practice when we gather now.

Connection Does Not Require Forced Intimacy

Meaningful connection does not require everyone at a gathering to know, trust, or relate to one another in the same way.

We experience this in other parts of life. Coworkers can share a meal at a work gathering without knowing one another’s private histories. Classmates, neighbors, community members, and even strangers can enjoy a conversation, exchange stories, discover shared interests, and offer help without first establishing a deeply intimate relationship.

Family gatherings can work similarly.

Some relatives may communicate regularly and know the details of one another’s lives. Others may only see each other during major gatherings. A family event may also include partners, friends, neighbors, chosen family, or other guests who don't share the same relational history.

Not everyone needs the same level of access for the gathering to be meaningful. Intimacy develops through disclosure and responsive interaction; you can't assume it from a family title alone (Laurenceau et al., 1998).

Connection may look like eating together, playing cards, dancing, helping prepare the meal, watching the children, asking someone about a recent accomplishment, or listening while a relative shares what has changed since everyone last met. It may simply mean being present and treating one another with dignity.

The gathering can make room for individual updates without requiring emotional exposure.

Families sometimes become accustomed to discussing the family collectively—or discussing relatives who aren't present—without learning much about the individual people in the room. Someone may be asked about work, school, parenting, relationships, health, politics, religion, or future plans. A question may begin as curiosity but become invasive when the person declines to answer, and the questioning continues.

Family membership does not create unlimited access to someone’s private life. People retain ownership of personal information, even within close relationships (Petronio, 2002).

An adult may make a decision that does not align with another relative’s values or beliefs. That difference does not automatically invite correction, instruction, or debate. Unless someone asks for advice, the conversation may simply be about understanding what is happening in that person’s life.

A person might say:

• “I’m not open to discussing that today.”

• “I hear that you believe differently. I’m not asking for advice about my decision.”

• “I’m comfortable sharing this much, but I’m keeping the rest private.”

• “I’d rather talk about that when we have more privacy.”

• “This deserves more time than we have right now. Can we schedule another conversation?”

A conversation may begin during a gathering without having to be completed there. If something requires privacy, preparation, consent, or sustained attention, people can agree to return to it later. This becomes especially important when children or guests outside the family are present and should not be given access to another person’s private information.

There are exceptions. A family may learn unexpected news that affects everyone, or someone may arrive needing immediate support. Intentional gathering does not mean people must ignore what is happening to protect the schedule. It means recognizing the difference between responding to an unexpected need and repeatedly using shared gatherings as the only place to release information that requires a more appropriate setting.

The person hosting the gathering can help establish the conditions of the space, but the host is not responsible for controlling every conversation or managing every adult’s behavior.

Depending on the gathering, the host or planning group may need to communicate:

• Who has been invited

• Whether children or guests outside the family will attend

• Whether alcohol will be served

• What household expectations apply

• Whether a group discussion or announcement is planned

• Whether anything requires advance preparation

Not every invitation requires a family vote. However, when someone’s presence is known to raise a serious concern related to another person’s dignity, boundaries, or ability to participate, the decision should not be treated as neutral. The people most affected may need to be consulted privately rather than expected to manage the situation after arriving.

Even with thoughtful planning, no host can anticipate everything. Each adult remains responsible for deciding what to share, when to redirect a conversation, when to ask for privacy, and when to step away.

Gathering with intention does not mean creating closeness that the relationships have not developed. It means making room for respectful connection at the level the relationships can honestly hold.

Shared Responsibility Makes Gathering More Sustainable

Gatherings require labor, including the less visible work of anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions, and monitoring what still needs attention (Daminger, 2019).

Someone communicates the details, prepares the space, buys supplies, plans the food, cooks, sets out dishes, welcomes people, considers the children, organizes activities, answers questions, cleans during the gathering, and restores the space afterward.

When that work remains unnamed, people may arrive and experience the gathering as if it simply appeared.

The person providing the location is not automatically responsible for every part of the event. It may help to separate the roles:

• The venue host provides the space and communicates any household expectations.

• The gathering coordinator tracks attendance, food, supplies, timing, and the overall plan.

• The shared helpers cook, transport people or supplies, prepare activities, support children, serve food, clean, or complete other agreed-upon tasks.

One person may fill more than one role, especially during a small gathering. In a larger family or community event, several people or small groups can divide the work. The location and leadership can also change from one gathering to the next.

Shared responsibility does not mean everyone completes the same task or contributes the same amount.

People arrive with different resources, abilities, schedules, travel distances, health needs, caregiving responsibilities, and seasons of life. One person may have more money than time. Another may have time but limited physical mobility. An elder may share a recipe, tell a family story, or help plan while someone else completes the physical work. A pregnant family member may bring supplies or prepare something beforehand and then need to rest during the gathering.

A contribution may involve money, transportation, planning, food, attention, physical effort, cleanup, or care. The goal is not to measure everyone against the same standard. The goal is to create a gathering where people can contribute honestly according to their capacity, without repeatedly leaving the same few people to carry everything.

Children also need to be included in the plan.

Children should not be expected to sit quietly for hours simply because the adults want to cook, talk, or watch a sporting event. Depending on their ages and interests, they may need activities, movement, food, rest, supervision, and opportunities to connect with other children and adults.

Parents and caregivers remain responsible for knowing what their children are likely to need. If a child requires attention during food preparation, tending to the child may become that adult’s most important contribution. The gathering can continue without one particular dish. Do not place a child in an unsafe or overstimulating kitchen because an adult feels obligated to help cook.

If several children will attend, the adults can discuss supervision beforehand. Someone may genuinely enjoy organizing games or spending time with the children. A willing and capable teenager may help, but a teenager should not automatically become the unpaid childcare plan simply because they are older than the other children. For larger gatherings, families may rotate adult supervision or arrange additional childcare when resources allow.

The plan should reflect the children who are actually coming—not an imagined version of children who will remain occupied without support.

Delegation works best before the gathering begins.

Instead of waiting until one person is overwhelmed, the planning group can identify what needs to happen and invite people to choose or accept specific responsibilities. Someone can bring paper products. Another person can prepare a dish. Someone can create the music playlist or organize games. People who do not cook might form the cleanup group.

Adults can also look around and notice what needs attention. The person coordinating the gathering shouldn't have to narrate every obvious task while doing her own work. At the same time, people may sincerely want to help but not know the plan, where supplies belong, or what the host is comfortable with them doing. Clear requests reduce guessing and resentment.

If someone repeatedly attends, eats, enjoys the event, and leaves without contributing, address the pattern directly. The person may not recognize how much work is involved, or may have become accustomed to others handling it. Before assuming unwillingness, the family can make a specific request: bring this item, arrive at this time, supervise this activity, or join the cleanup group.

When people agree to help, follow-through matters. Leaving early to avoid an assigned responsibility shifts the work back onto someone else.

The person who usually overfunctions also has a responsibility to communicate. Holding every task, refusing assistance, and then becoming resentful does not create shared responsibility. Asking for help, delegating clearly, and letting others complete tasks in their own reasonable way are part of changing the pattern.

Include rest in the plan, too.

The people who prepared the gathering deserve time to eat, talk, laugh, and enjoy it. If everyone else gets to sit down while the same person remains in the kitchen, manages the children, and cleans afterward, the gathering is being supported by that person’s depletion.

An intentional gathering does not require mathematical equality. It asks people to recognize what makes the gathering possible and participate in ways that reflect their capacity, resources, and responsibility to one another.

Prepare Your Body • Mind • Soul

Preparing for a gathering can begin days before anyone arrives.

The goal is not to control every possible outcome. Planning doesn't guarantee everything will happen as expected. It creates a map. When something changes, you know what you have already handled, what you can adjust, and where you were trying to go. Research on concrete when, where, and how plans also shows that planning can support follow-through (Gollwitzer, 1999). That structure gives your mind more room to rest and your body more capacity to respond.

Prepare Your Body

Physical preparation includes the ordinary details that can make the day easier.

If you are bringing food, prepare what you can beforehand. A dish might be completely cooked and only need reheating, or its ingredients may be packed and ready to assemble. Make a checklist so your mind does not have to keep calculating whether you remembered everything.

Consider your transportation and travel needs early. Do you need gas, a hotel, directions, or a plan for returning home? If you are helping with setup, will you need comfortable clothes for working and something different to wear during the gathering?

Rest matters too. A late night, an empty stomach, uncomfortable clothing, and a rushed morning can affect how you show up. Eat breakfast or prepare something simple that you can easily grab. Wear clothing that allows you to feel comfortable in your body. If possible, begin the morning slowly—with tea or coffee, calming music, prayer, journaling, or another familiar practice.

Preparation is not about creating a perfect routine. It is about reducing the preventable strain that can leave you depleted before the gathering has even begun.

Prepare Your Mind

Before the gathering, check in with your expectations.

What usually happens when these people come together? What role do you tend to assume? Are you expecting yourself to organize everyone, prevent disagreement, keep people entertained, or notice every unmet need? How far have you come since the last gathering, and how do you want to respond if an old relational pattern appears?

These questions are not predictions that something will go wrong. The familiar pattern may not appear at all. The purpose is to recognize that you have choices if it does.

Preparing your mind also means addressing what you can address beforehand. If something has been bothering you and you need to speak with a particular person, the family gathering doesn't have to be the first available opportunity. Technology gives us other options: a phone call, video conversation, or a separate meeting in a more private setting.

Unexpected news may still arise. Someone may need support, plans may shift, or a concern may become visible that no one anticipated. That is different from carrying a matter for weeks or months and intentionally waiting until the gathering to release it.

If family contact regularly causes significant distress or brings up painful experiences that are difficult to manage, preparation may require more than a checklist. A psychotherapist can help someone examine those relational patterns and develop an individualized plan before the gathering season.

Prepare Your Soul

Soul preparation asks: Why am I going, and how do I want to participate?

You might begin the day with a personal prayer, a brief ritual, quiet reflection, or a few minutes of journaling. You might name what you are grateful for, remember someone who will not be present, or set an intention for how you want to carry yourself.

This is also a time to consider your life force.

How much energy do you realistically have available? What responsibilities have you agreed to hold? What might you need to decline? Are you placing significant life force into an activity, meal, or tradition that no one actually values?

When planning a gathering, it can help to ask people what they enjoy and what they would like to experience. Games, activities, or traditions may continue because one person assumed everyone wanted them. A simple conversation—or a short planning survey for a larger gathering—can reveal what people find meaningful before someone invests substantial time, money, and life force into creating it.

Give Yourself Somewhere to Return

Preparation continues during and after the gathering.

Arriving early may give you time to help with setup, settle into the space, and understand what still needs attention. During the gathering, notice your limits. You may need food, water, a quiet moment, a change of clothes, fresh air, or permission to leave when your participation is complete.

Afterward, create space to come down from the experience. If possible, leave part of the evening or the following day open for rest and restoration. You may journal about what felt good, what surprised you, what did not work, and what you would change next time.

If you hosted or coordinated the gathering, you can also invite feedback:

• What did you enjoy?

• What helped you feel connected?

• Was anything missing?

• What would you like to experience differently next time?

• Is there a tradition or activity we no longer need?

Preparation helps you arrive with greater awareness, but it cannot determine the mood of the room or the behavior of everyone in it. You can enter grounded in your own intention, respond to what is actually happening, and return to yourself afterward.

Create Something Worth Carrying Forward

A meaningful gathering does not have to be a perfect gathering.

Plans may change. Someone may arrive tired. An unexpected concern may surface. Grief or sorrow may enter the room even when the purpose of the gathering was celebration.

That does not automatically mean the gathering failed.

The more useful questions may be: Were people able to remain present? Could they acknowledge what was happening without suppressing it or allowing it to consume the entire gathering? Were they able to regulate their emotions, support one another, and adjust when the day became different from what they expected?

Sometimes everything goes well. People eat, laugh, dance, play games, exchange updates, and enjoy being together. Other times, the gathering holds joy and difficulty at the same table. Both experiences can become part of the family’s story.

People may carry forward a conversation, a new understanding, a funny moment, a meal they enjoyed, or the feeling of being welcomed. It may be learning something about a relative that they never knew or realizing that a relationship has room to grow.

Families can also create tangible records of the gathering.

A planned family photograph can capture who was present during that season. By the next gathering, someone may be unable to attend because of work, finances, health, travel, or death. Even when gatherings happen several times a year, we do not know what will change between one photograph and the next.

Photos don't have to be posted publicly to have value. They can remain within the family, become part of an album, or be shared privately with the consent of the people pictured.

Families might also preserve:

• Recipes and the stories connected to them

• Family updates

• Photographs and handwritten notes

• Memories of relatives who are no longer living

• Children’s artwork or reflections

• Accomplishments, transitions, and new interests

• Questions people want to revisit at the next gathering

• Ideas for improving future gatherings

You don't have to document everything during the event. You can record a recipe later, when the kitchen is quiet. Photographs can be organized afterward. Someone can follow up with an elder about the story behind a particular dish or tradition.

A Family Harvest Celebration

One year, I created a voluntary activity called the Family Harvest Celebration: Family and Ancestral Spotlight.

Before the gathering, I sent family members a form that gave them time to reflect on what they had been doing, what had changed in their lives, and what they wanted to share. Participation was optional. I did not continue pressuring people who chose not to respond.

I gathered the submitted updates, printed them, and arranged them on a trifold display at our family gathering.

The display gave everyone an opportunity to learn what participating family members had been doing throughout the year. We might have spoken individually at different times, but we had not all been together in one place. During the gathering, I also helped with food and other responsibilities, so I couldn't sit down for an extended conversation with everyone.

The display helped close that gap.

People could read the updates at their own pace. They discovered interests, accomplishments, and changes they may not have known about. The information also created natural conversation starters:

I saw that you were working on this. How is it going?

I didn’t know you were interested in that.

Tell me more about what you’ve been learning.

Even people who did not submit an update could read the display and find new ways to connect with relatives. The activity did not force anyone to disclose information. It invited people to be known and celebrated at the level each person chose.

That is one way a gathering can add something new to a family’s story.

Carrying the Practice Forward

Traditions don't have to stay unchanged to remain meaningful. A family can keep what still creates connection, revise what has become burdensome, and release what no longer fits the people who are actually present.

Children and younger family members are also learning from the way adults gather. They notice who performs the work, whose voice matters, how people respond to grief, whether privacy is respected, and whether contribution and care are shared. What they observe becomes part of what they may carry into their own relationships and future gatherings.

At the end of an event, the family or planning group can ask:

• What felt meaningful?

• What helped people connect?

• What created unnecessary strain?

• What would we like to keep?

• What would we like to change?

• What do we want to create next time?

The purpose is not to turn every gathering into a formal evaluation. It is to remain curious about whether the gathering is serving the people participating in it.

We carry forward not only the date, the menu, or the tradition. We also carry forward what the gathering teaches us about connection, responsibility, joy, remembrance, and belonging.

Grounded Reflection

Before your next gathering, take a few moments to consider:

•  Which gatherings feel meaningful to me, and which ones do I attend mainly because they are expected?

•  What history or tradition do I understand, and what might I still need to learn?

•  What role do I usually assume when people come together, and what does that role require from me?

•  What level of connection can these relationships honestly hold without forced intimacy?

•  How can the preparation, care, cost, and cleanup be shared more fairly?

•  What do I want people—including me—to carry forward when the gathering ends?

From Gathering With Intention to Legacy in Practice

Every gathering leaves something behind. Sometimes it is a photograph, a recipe, a story, or a new family tradition. Sometimes it is the experience of being considered, welcomed, listened to, or invited to contribute.

Legacy is not only what a family says it values. It is also what people repeatedly practice: how responsibility is shared, how privacy is honored, how children and elders are included, how grief is acknowledged, and how people care for one another without asking one person to carry the whole experience.

In December, we will move into Legacy in Practice and consider how these ordinary choices become part of what families and communities carry forward. Gathering with intention gives us a place to begin practicing that legacy now.

References

Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419859007

Fiese, B. H., Tomcho, T. J., Douglas, M., Josephs, K., Poltrock, S., & Baker, T. (2002). A review of 50 years of research on naturally occurring family routines and rituals: Cause for celebration? Journal of Family Psychology, 16(4), 381–390. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.16.4.381

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493

Hale, S. J. (1863, September 28). Sarah J. Hale to Abraham Lincoln, Monday, September 28, 1863 (Thanksgiving) [Letter]. Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.2669900/?sp=1&st=text

Laurenceau, J.-P., Barrett, L. F., & Pietromonaco, P. R. (1998). Intimacy as an interpersonal process: The importance of self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1238–1251. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1238

Lincoln, A. (1863, October 3). President Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day proclamation of October 3, 1863 (Presidential Proclamation 106) [Presidential proclamation]. National Archives. https://visit.archives.gov/whats-on/explore-exhibits/president-abraham-lincolns-thanksgiving-day-proclamation

National Archives Museum. (n.d.). Thanksgiving: Historical perspectives. https://visit.archives.gov/whats-on/explore-exhibits/thanksgiving-historical-perspectives

Petronio, S. (2002). Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. State University of New York Press.

Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. (n.d.-a). The “First Thanksgiving” timeline. https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/thanksgiving/timeline.html

Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. (n.d.-b). Rethinking Thanksgiving celebrations: Native perspectives on Thanksgiving. https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/informational/rethinking-thanksgiving