AS this paper goes to print, households all over the United States will be preparing for the Thanksgiving feast that inspires 46.3 million Americans to travel at least 50 miles or more to be with family and friends.

Thanksgiving is hands-down my favourite holiday. Always the fourth Thursday of November, it's a federal holiday as is the Friday (one to eat, one to digest?) with the straightforward agenda of a harvest festival meal. So there are no presents to buy, no tricky political or religious waters to navigate – as long as everyone agrees to interpret the historical origins of Thanksgiving fairly loosely of course, not much of a stretch for a nation that brought Hollywood and Disney to the world. Historical facts and details about that first Thanksgiving are, well...glossed over in favour of the fairytale with a happy ending. The rose-coloured version goes something like this: in 1621 after much mutual cooperation and goodwill, Pilgrims and native people enjoyed a particularly bountiful harvest and so gathered for a meal to celebrate their good fortune and friendship.

Such a nice image: old hands and newcomers settling down to that first convivial meal of turkey (free-range before it was cool) and all the trimmings, everyone beaming happily, those pilgrims expressing their grateful thanks for the warm welcome and helpful tips, the indigenous folks all hospitable and pleased to be of service to their new friends and neighbours from across the pond.

Now historians admit there's little evidence from that first 'Thanksgiving' to go on so it's hard to know what actually happened back then but it seems pretty clear that even if the records of this occasion are accurate, that cosy scene wasn't as common as we might wish, especially given what we know about some of the disturbing details we prefer to overlook – details, you know, like the smallpox epidemic, the massacres and the slavery.

Modern-day Thanksgiving doesn't always match its fairytale ideal either. Roads are congested, airports are hectic, the weather is often quite bad and can mess up best-laid travel plans. So nerves can be quite frayed even before you account for the fact that family gatherings are fertile ground for tension. Someone drinks too much, says the wrong thing or says the usual thing that triggers the usual exasperated response.

Never mind. The lucky ones who have a feast to tuck into will toast whatever goodwill there was around the table of that first thanksgiving meal, and be thankful that there's still enough around to bring so many people together the same time each year.