For many years, we’ve traveled for the Thanksgiving holiday and had the honor of being guests at my cousin’s table for the big event. When we arrive in Ohio, my family makes a complicated day look effortless. The turkey is perfect, as are the mashed potatoes. Gravy is carefully prepared, and there are always these great pecan rolls from a local bakery that we try to snatch before we actually sit down to eat. The table looks lovely, and it’s so special. Like I said, they make it look easy.

This year, we’re staying home and playing the host ourselves, and I’m equal parts excited and anxious. I’ve cooked The Meal before, so I know what’s involved. My Pinterest board is full of ideas from appetizers to desserts, and I ordered the turkey in the first week of November. My kids weighed in on what’s sacred (turkey, mashed potatoes, and rolls) and what can be “left out” (cranberry sauce, any other vegetables). I love a classic green bean and mushroom soup casserole with fried onions on top (sorry, not sorry), and I like homemade cranberry sauce, even if nobody else does.

My family also had its own cranberry tradition: cranberry Jell-O with whole cranberry sauce and strawberries, set in a domed Tupperware mold and served with a sweetened sour cream dressing. Would it release from the mold in one piece of ruby-colored glory? My mom and I would work on it together, as the house filled with the intoxicating scent of roasting turkey. It was always the last thing to hit the table. I found one of those molds in a thrift store a few years ago, and I purchased it (and the little inset molds with a heart, a tree, a star). I haven’t made it in years, but perhaps it’s time to bring that tradition back.

Maybe that’s part of what I love most about Thanksgiving, the continuity of it. The way recipes and rituals get handed down, changed a little, but still recognizable. The cranberry mold never looked like anyone else’s, but it was ours. A small, wobbly inheritance. And maybe that’s true of families too, each of us carrying forward a mix of old patterns and new intentions, trying to make it all hold together.

For many years, it’s been easy to arrive at my cousin’s home and take a seat at their table. As guests, we admire how smoothly everything runs, the timing, the warmth, the effortless choreography of family and food. It’s easy to forget how much work goes into making it all look so natural. But when you host, when it’s your turn, you see it differently. You notice what it takes to make a feast happen, to hold everyone together. You start to care about every detail, because suddenly it’s yours to protect.

I think about that sometimes when I look at our country, the Great Experiment, as the founders called it. For a long time, it was easy to be a guest. To believe that the hard work had already been done, that democracy was self-sustaining. But hosting is different. When you see people trying to take away what you thought was already settled, the welcome, the fairness, the sense that everyone belongs, you take notice. You care a little more. You want to make sure the table holds.

If the story Americans want to tell is that of cooperation and welcome, then we should start at our beginnings. But beginnings, like recipes, are rarely as tidy as the index cards make them seem. The Thanksgiving myth, all hospitality and harmony, is more fiction than fact. The reality was harder, more uneven, and far less photogenic. Still, even in that myth, there are ingredients worth keeping, gratitude, gathering, the idea that breaking bread together can be its own small act of hope.

Maybe the true inheritance of Thanksgiving isn’t the Pilgrim story at all, but the rhythm of setting the table year after year, choosing to be together even when the world feels unsteady. Because at the table, we tell the real stories. We talk about what we’re thankful for, yes, but also what we want to do better. We share updates, inside jokes, little confessions that wouldn’t fit anywhere else. Around that table, values get passed like serving dishes, empathy, kindness, patience, the willingness to listen. The table is where we remember how lucky we are, and where we remind each other not to let that luck harden into complacency.

When I think about America, I think about tables like these, some polished and sprawling, some wobbly and scarred, some folding tables set up in church basements or shelters, where volunteers ladle soup and call strangers “hon.” All of them are part of the same picture, people trying, in whatever way they can, to feed one another. To make the world a little warmer, one plate at a time.

When the meal is over and everyone drifts toward the couch, I’ll pack away leftovers and think about what it means to keep setting this table, to keep trying. Maybe that’s what America is, at its best, the ongoing effort to gather, to make space, to feed one another even when it’s hard. Not because it’s easy or perfect, but because it matters. The table, the Great Experiment itself, only holds if all of us are welcome and active participants. The founders called it a more perfect union, not a completely perfect one, and maybe that’s the point, the trying, the gathering, the welcoming of guests from everywhere to sit at our big, messy, imperfect American table. Together. With liberty and justice for all.

Heather Reid is a Chicago-based writer who believes the best meals—and the best stories—start with making room for one more.