Thanksgiving is the start of the major winter holiday travel season, and while most of us are simply driving or flying back home to family across the nation, others are making their way to destinations across the globe to celebrate the holiday.
While companies like Amtrak are expecting a record year for Thanksgiving holiday travel, it’s also important to take a step beyond which destinations are trending this Thanksgiving to get at the real heart of the holiday in the United States: giving thanks and practicing gratitude for making it through the year’s many challenges, and feasting on whatever bounty you have been provided.
So how can you do that when you’re someone traveling on vacation for the holidays, as opposed to gathering with family and friends?
Celebrate and Honor Indigenous Cultures in America
A group tours the Chickasaw Cultural Center with a guide. (Photo Credit: Chickasaw Country)
Here in the United States, travelers heading to celebrate Thanksgiving somewhere else this year can enjoy honoring Native American Heritage Month, culinary traditions and the preservation of Indigenous cultures pretty much anywhere you go.
While it’s a growing, lesser-known subsector of tourism in the U.S., travelers can find responsible, Indigenous-led tourism experiences from Alaska to Florida on Destination Native America, a platform run by the American Indigenous Tourism Association.
Integrating an Indigenous tourism experience is fairly easy.
Travelers can shop for ingredients for their Thanksgiving meal at the Oneida Market in Green Bay, Wisconsin; stay at a working ranch and learn horsemanship and other fascinating skills at the Lakota-owned DX Ranch in Gettysburg, South Dakota; or take an Indigenous-led hike through Bear’s Ears National Monument and Monument Valley in Utah with Ancient Wayves River and Hiking Adventures—and these are just a few examples.
While so many of us preserve stories of immigration and the cultures of other countries in our personal lives, it can be an incredibly meaningful experience getting to learn more about the people who have lived here in this part of the world for thousands of years.
For those heading to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Canada or South America, there research the experiences available to you—while Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated across North and South America (Canada is the only other country that celebrates it, and it’s in October), there’s bound to be organizations promoting Indigenous experiences, too, like the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada, for example.
Participate in a Voluntourism Initiative
Gardening in Hawaii. (photo via HeatherGoodman, Hawaii Tourism Authority)
One of the best ways to increase personal gratitude is to use your gifts to serve others.
Luckily for travelers, more destinations are creating new ways for them to give back to the communities they visit!
This will take some research to find and plan, but it will be worth it. For example, Hawai’i is offering its Malama Hawai’i program, now more important than ever following in the wake of Maui’s devastating wildfires of 2023.
There are over 320 different voluntourism experiences all across the major Hawaiian islands, ranging from coastal restoration and native plant conservation initiatives to weekly volunteer workdays at beaches and gardens around the state.
Another new program is Aruba’s Volunteer Time Off (or Aruba VTO) program, which utilizes companies’ volunteer time off benefits to allow travelers to use that time to visit Aruba and spend a few hours participating in a voluntourism activity, like a beach cleanup, in partnership with local nonprofits and resorts.
What’s more meaningful for a Thanksgiving vacation than using a portion of it to help and serve others?
Start and Maintain a Travel Journal
A woman sits at a cafe and reads with a warm drink. (Photo Credit: WavebreakMediaMicro / AdobeStock)
While this might seem a little off-beat, one amazing way to grow personal gratitude, especially for the gift and privilege that is travel, is to write about it. Instead of posting your favorite pictures on Instagram, try instead to travel with greater intention, with a journal and your preferred writing utensil.
Each day, write about what you’ve done, seen and experienced—write about the people you’ve encountered, good or bad, and try your best to document your most meaningful moments and what you’ve learned each day.
Besides practicing gratitude for your personal, daily travel experiences, you might also find out more about yourself—what you value, based on what you focus on writing about, what moves you, what you naturally gravitate towards, and what repulses you like a magnet—and that’s an indispensable gift in and of itself.
If you’ll be traveling on vacation this Thanksgiving, consider bringing a journal or a notebook along and taking some time each day to write some bullet point notes, a few paragraphs, or even several pages—in the end, it doesn’t matter how much you write, but that you do it.
Who knows? You might just realize those annual winter-weather trips to a resort in the Caribbean are one of the major joys of your year, or that the people you meet on vacation are people you’d like to be long-distance friends with long after the vacation has ended.
Lastly, Thank Your Federal Workers
A federal employee donation bin at the airport, where travelers can donate items for TSA and ATC workers. (Photo Credit: Lacey Pfalz)
Unfortunately, there’s a chance that the U.S. government shutdown will continue through the busy Thanksgiving holiday period. If so, that means that thousands of TSA and air traffic control workers won’t have been paid in months, and that creates insane stress on the air travel system nationwide.
This Thanksgiving, if you’ll be taking a plane anywhere, I suggest you pack your patience and gratitude—and thank your federal workers, not just personally, but by researching ways to support them during this challenging time in their lives.
At my local airport, for example, the airport started taking nonperishable food and personal care item donations to support local federal workers as soon as the shutdown began.
When I visited the airport in late October, I brought with me three bags full of food and feminine care products to donate—check out if your chosen airport is doing a similar program, and encourage others to support our federal workers, too.
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