Well Thanksgiving isn't Christmas. There aren't dozens of films about it and more added each year. The main one is
Planes, Trains & Automobiles. After that is Jodie Foster's wonderful
Home for the Holidays and the very good indie
Pieces of April.
Those are the big three.
What's Cooking is fine, but not as good as Foster's movie or
Pieces of April.
Dutch is just an embarrassing retread of everything John Hughes did so much better in every single way in
PT&A.
And nobody over the age of forty should forget
Alice's Restaurant (1969), the film version of Arlo Guthrie's comic and satirical epic ballad about dumping trash and avoiding the Draft.
Then there are a bunch that, like Woody Allen's
Hannah & Her Sisters, use the Thanksgiving holiday as the setting for the film, but aren't really
about Thanksgiving Day. These would include
The Ice Storm (1997),
The Myth of Fingerprints (1997) and
The House of Yes (1997)...apparently 1997 was a watershed year for using Thanksgiving as an ironic setting for dark family tales.
Tadpole (2002) is also a Thanksgiving weekend setting. Love that little movie, but it's hardly a "Thanksgiving" flick. There are a couple others that use Thanksgiving as a backdrop in this way, but those are the major entries.
And yes,
Addams Family Values (1993) does have that hysterical scene where Wednesday and Pugsley lead a violent revolt with the other misfit kids against the sunny counselors (Christine Baranski & Peter MacNicol) and the snobby, snotty, privileged, perky pretty children at camp during the Thanksgiving pageant, kicked off with Wednesday's glorious proclamation, "And for all of these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground."
It's probably the single best moment in either of those two
Addams Family movies of the early '90s. Little Christina Ricci is so great doing deadpan dark comedy in those two flicks, and that is her crowning moment.
Although it's much more than JUST a Thanksgiving movie, Barry Levinson's wonderful
Avalon (1990) has a few key scene set during the holiday as we watch one Jewish-American family drift apart over the decades. The Thanksgiving dinner tradition is actually one of the things that fractures them. After some of the Krichinsky clan move to the suburbs and the dinner is held there instead of one of the downtown Baltimore homes it always had been, one of the brothers is late. He is always late. Rather than wait for him this time, his brother Sam (Armin Mueller-Stahl) makes the decision to cut the turkey and start without them. When his annually tardy brother does finally arrive, he is hurt that they did not wait and storms out, causing the extended family to choose sides. It's the third of Levinson's "Baltimore Films", following
Diner and
Tin Men, and is a great movie.
Miracle on 34th Street of course starts with Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but it's a Christmas movie through and through.
And that's about it. If I were a filmmaker looking to add something to the holiday canon, I wouldn't mess with the overcrowded Christmas scene but instead try and distinguish myself in the smaller Thanksgiving field.