The Bottle We Always Bring

Friendsgiving, where the word came from, and the Dry Creek Valley wine that has been on the table every year since 2019

Illustration generated with AI.

In the fall of 2019 I was living in Foster City, a town on the bay side of San Mateo County that didn’t exist until the 1960s, when a developer named T. Jack Foster and his sons pumped millions of cubic yards of sand into the tidal marsh of Brewer Island and built a city on top of it, with lagoons where the sloughs used to be. It is a pleasant place to live and a hard place to feel rooted, and most of the people I knew there had come from somewhere else and planned on leaving for somewhere else again. That fall was also my first one single after thirty years of marriage, and the divorce was still new enough that the holidays ahead looked long. Most of the friends I had were a two-hour drive north, in Sonoma County and Windsor, people I had known for a year or less, and I spent every weekend I could on 101 going to see them.

So when they invited me to something they called Friendsgiving, the Saturday before the real one, I said yes before they finished the sentence. The instructions were the kind that come with these things: bring a dish if I felt like it, bring a bottle, and don’t worry about it. I worried about it anyway. I settled on a bottle from Amista, a small winery on Dry Creek Road that my Sonoma friends had sent me to, partly because I liked the wine and partly because of what the name means, which is loosely the Spanish for making friends. It seemed like the right thing to carry through the door of a house full of people I barely knew.

The kitchen windows were fogged by the time I got there, and the turkey was running late, the way turkeys have run late at every Thanksgiving in the history of the country, so the bottle got opened early and passed around while people stood at the counter with their coats still on. A couple of us were newly divorced, some of the guests were gay, some had only just moved to Sonoma County, and others lived too far from home to get there for a long weekend. The one thing everybody in that kitchen had in common was the wine, and it gave a room full of near strangers something to talk about. Somewhere between the first glass and the carving, somebody asked who had come up with the word Friendsgiving in the first place. Nobody knew. Everyone had a theory, and most of the theories involved a television show.

The real answer is a better story than any of us guessed. The earliest written use anyone has found is one line on a Usenet message board called Friends of the Friendless, posted on December 4, 2007, by someone who signed off with “Happy Friendsgiving Y’all!!!” and never explained it, which tells the dictionary people the word was already being said out loud. A year later a newspaper in Pensacola, Florida, was suggesting Friendsgiving for what it called holiday orphans, people who couldn’t get home, which would have described most of the people in that kitchen. In 2011 a Baileys ad and an episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey pushed the word into everyday use, Butterball went so far as to file a trademark on “Butterball Friendsgiving,” and in January 2020 Merriam-Webster put it in the dictionary. The show Friends sat its six characters around a Thanksgiving table season after season, but the editors there found no sign the word came from it.

For most of American history, the whole point of the holiday was going home. Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, after years of letters from the magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, and four years later Currier & Ives published a lithograph called Home to Thanksgiving, a snowy farmyard with a sleigh pulling up and a family at the door to meet it. The historian Matthew Dennis has pointed out that in a country where people kept moving away, Thanksgiving became the day they tried to put their families back together. A meal with friends instead was what happened when that didn’t work out, and for a long time nobody thought it needed a name. Charlie Brown hosted one in 1973, when Peppermint Patty invited herself, Marcie and Franklin over, and he and Snoopy put out buttered toast, pretzels, jelly beans and popcorn.

Dennis also makes the case that the first one was closer to Friendsgiving than to a family dinner. At Plymouth in the fall of 1621, about fifty English colonists who had survived their first year held a harvest celebration, and the Wampanoag leader Ousamequin, whom the English called Massasoit, arrived with about ninety of his men. They stayed three days, and the Wampanoag went out and brought back five deer. The two peoples had agreed to protect each other that spring, and what came after, over the next half century, was a long way from friendship. But for three days in 1621, in Dennis’s words, “The idea was to have a Thanksgiving to create friends.”

The summer after that first Friendsgiving, in 2020, when tastings had only just moved back outdoors, I finally sat in the chairs out back at Amista, the ones that face away from the building and out over the fields. A bowl of their seasoned popcorn came around, the same as it does for everybody, and the two strangers in the chairs beside ours turned out to be Ron and Leslie. We went to dinner with them that night. From then on the Friendsgiving bottle was nearly always Amista’s Sparkling Syrah, the one that goes off with a little red foam and gets a cheer from whoever is standing closest.

The table has moved every few years since. People moved away, new friends turned up, and when we moved over the mountains to Sparks, the dinner came with us. Ron and Leslie have been at it more years than not, but these days they are as likely to be in Denver, or back in Windsor, or off visiting their kids and grandkids, and this year they won’t make it.

This year is different in another way too. For the first time, Friendsgiving won’t be in anybody’s kitchen. We’re having it at the Atlantis in Reno, a resort that started in 1972 as the Golden Road Motor Inn, a motel on South Virginia Street bought by the Farahi family, who had come to Reno from Iran and settled there partly because the country around it reminded them of Tehran. It seems a fitting place for a dinner that was invented by people a long way from where they started. Nobody has to fight the oven this time, and nobody will be standing at a fogged-up window waiting on the turkey.

The bottle is coming with us anyway. It is already packed, in a wine bag by the door in Sparks, and when it gets opened at the Atlantis the first glass will go to whoever is sitting closest. The second one I’ll pour for the two people who aren’t there, and set it down at the empty place at the end of the table.

Some details of the dinners in this story have been combined.

Sources

Merriam-Webster, “Where Does ‘Friendsgiving’ Come From?” (Words We’re Watching, updated January 2020). Rachel Treisman, “Friendsgiving 101: A History of the Made-Up Holiday,” NPR, November 2025. Ashley Fetters, “How Friendsgiving Took Over Millennial Culture,” The Atlantic, November 15, 2018, with historian Matthew Dennis. Edward Winslow, letter of December 1621, published in Mourt’s Relation (1622); Pilgrim Hall Museum, “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth.” Currier & Ives after George Henry Durrie, Home to Thanksgiving, 1867, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Gallery of Art. City of Foster City, General Plan, “Introduction”; San Mateo Daily Journal, “Foster City Was Once an Island.” The Nevada Independent, profile of John Farahi, 2025; Monarch Casino & Resort company history.