Thanksgiving – that American holiday noted as much for clogging up highways with travelers as for clogging up arteries with candied yams – is upon us once again. It's the rare US holiday that's largely free of commercialization, leaving many of us to do what families do best: eat too much food and watch television together.
Our collection of the best Thanksgiving moments from TV and film:
Friends
Friends did a Thanksgiving episode nearly every year, and it's a toss-up between Brad Pitt (at the time Mr Jenifer Aniston) and the one where Monica puts a turkey on her head as to which one is our favorite. You decide:
Does the turkey-on-the-head routine lose points because Mr Bean did it first?
The Cosby Show
Kenny sneaks into the family dinner, but Cliff is sadly not wearing a sweater.
The West Wing
President Bartlet was a fan of the feasting holiday and all its trimmings: the perfect stuffing, the sharpest carving knife, the Mayflower ancestry. We had to stop ourselves at two favorite moments from the show:
CJ pleads with the president to pardon a second turkey:
Bartlet discovers the Butterball hotline ("God I love my country"):
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Spike's tied up and … a bear shows up? We're not entirely sure what led to this happening, but, hey, it's Buffy.
How I Met Your Mother
Barney lives in fear of Slapsgiving.
Addams Family Values
Thanksgiving is, among other things, a reminder of the treatment Native Americans received at the hands of their colonial invaders. Wednesday Addams reminds us of this:
Holiday Inn
It's not embeddable, but the 1942 Bing Crosby film Holiday Inn features a song for nearly every holiday, including Thanksgiving.
The OC
Another one with embedding disabled: Adam Brody's Seth finds himself caught between two women, because that's what the OC is about, even on holidays.
Gilmore Girls
A special thanks to the folks over at the Daily Beast, who created this clip of what I personally think is the best Thanksgiving episode ever, in which proper chef Sookie deals with her husband's request to deep fry a turkey ("It's like a death in the family").
Roseanne
The Conners were loud, blue-collar, snarky, occasionally mean – and one of the best ever TV representations of a normal, cohesive American family unit. Here, DJ's ninth-grade history class goes a bit Tarantino in their lesson:
Home for the Holidays
A less loving family unit was captured in the 1995 film directed by Jodie Foster. Robert Downey Jr "accidentally" tosses a turkey on Cynthia Stevenson's lap:
What else?
This is already a long list, but we've still probably managed to miss your favorite. Tell us about your favorite filmed Thanksgiving below.
