Kip, yes, Thanksgiving is meant to be a day where you are thankful for everything you've got. You can be thankful for friends, family, and even material stuff like being thankful for having a nice home and having a nice meal to share with everyone. You can serve the meal as lunch or dinner. My family usually serves the food earlier in the day because some of the stores open in the evening, so in my family everyone eats, naps/watches football, then goes shopping in the evening (and gets up early too to do more shopping). My hubby's family doesn't like shopping as much so they serve the meal in the evening (so at their house we usually watch football first, then eat, then go home and sleep it off, decorate and maybe shop the next day). So you can do whatever works best for you, there's not a hard and fast tradition about what time the food is to be served. There's always a football game on TV and for some reason it's always the Detroit Lions playing on Thanksgiving day. I don't know why that is but that's become a tradition! There's a parade on TV in the mornings too, the Macy's parade with all the big balloon characters. So we get the day off work and mostly watch TV and eat, but the important part is to spend time with your loved ones and be thankful for the people and good things in your life.
I'm not sure if people outside of the US know the story of how Thanksgiving started? If you don't, here it is in a nutshell. Here in the US, children in school are taught that the pilgrims who had just come over on the Mayflower to settle in the new world in 1620 met some friendly Indians when they arrived, and the Indians shared their food in a big meal with the pilgrims, and this great feast helped the pilgrims get through the hard winter. It's a nice story, but in reality it's more along the lines of, the pilgrims found a store of food that the Native Americans had hidden, and the pilgrims stole this store of food and that's how they actually survived the hard first winter (and about half the pilgrims didn't survive through the first winter so even then it was pretty rough). I'm a direct descendant of a couple of Mayflower pilgrims so I prefer the happy shared meal story better.
Nobody wants to think that their ancestors were thieves, but of course I'm glad they did survive that winter or else I wouldn't be here, so I have mixed feelings on the whole thing.
