Every year I see more posts about Friendsgiving gatherings, and honestly it feels like a newer tradition that's blown up in the last few years. My friend group has been doing it for a while now, but I'm curious if this is actually replacing traditional family Thanksgiving for some people or if it's just something people do in addition to their regular holiday plans.
Friendsgiving took off mainly because it lets people celebrate with whoever matters to them most, not just who they're obligated to see by family ties - and social media made sharing those gatherings instant and constant. For most folks it's something they do in addition to family stuff, but you'll definitely find people who use it as their main Thanksgiving because they've moved far from home, have complicated family situations, or just click better with their friend group. The tradition probably isn't that new (people have been doing casual holiday dinners with friends forever), but the name and the whole Instagram-friendly packaging of it as its own thing is pretty recent, which is why it feels like it suddenly exploded everywhere.
I think the social media angle gets overstated - my friend group was doing Friendsgiving back when nobody was posting about it online, and plenty of people still celebrate it quietly without broadcasting anything. What's probably changed more is that it's become socially acceptable to openly admit you'd rather spend the holiday with friends than trek across the country for obligatory family time, whereas that used to feel like something you kept to yourself. For a lot of folks it's genuinely not a replacement for traditional Thanksgiving but a separate thing entirely - they'll do both if they can, or pick one depending on the year. The visibility definitely makes it feel newer than it probably is.
The real shift is that it's stopped being something you did *instead of* family Thanksgiving and became something you do *in addition to* it - which is why it feels like it's everywhere now. What both previous answers miss is that for a lot of people, Friendsgiving has actually become the more stressful obligation, not the relaxing alternative it was supposed to be; you've got the pressure of coordinating schedules with multiple friends, hosting duties, and then still having to show up for family stuff, so it's less "choosing who matters" and more "now I've got two holidays to manage.
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