With Thanksgiving coming around the corner, people’s Instagram feeds and TikTok For You Pages are about to be flooded with posts about family. Thanksgiving is all about family. About your grandfather’s silly old-fashioned tirades and your siblings kicking you under the dining table. Thanksgiving has always been marketed around family. However, with this season coming fast upon us, I think it’s important to point out that the ‘biological family’ isn’t the only family we’re stuck with. Chosen families exist and I think we’re moving more and more in that direction.
Chosen or ‘found’ families are becoming a more common way to understand what the word family means. With shows like Pose the concept of finding your people has become more popular. People are seeking out to be understood, sometimes in a way that the family they’re born into can’t. It’s important that, going into this holiday season, we remember that family looks different to everyone, and we’re slowly moving away from the old-fashioned concept of the ‘nuclear family’.
The phrase, “blood is thicker than water” is used by a lot of people to insist that familial bonds are stronger than the ones made by choice. However, the actual phrase is, “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”. The real meaning behind this commonly misconstrued phase means the exact opposite of what we’re used to. “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” was used in the olden days to refer to blood shed in battle, and means that bonds formed through hardship matter more than relationships over shared genes.
Chosen family can consist of both people who are blood-related to you and who are not. All that family is, is just people who show up for you again and again. When it’s hard, when you need it, when it matters. This doesn’t mean that people you are related to can’t be part of your chosen family either! A chosen family just means the people you have chosen to surround yourself with. Whoever that includes is completely up to you.
To everyone who can’t (or doesn’t want to) celebrate Thanksgiving with their biological family, remember that you can always create your own, your family is how you define it. Happy Thanksgiving, eat well!