Can you make it through Thanksgiving dinner without looking at your phone?

There’s a platter for the turkey and serving bowls for the green beans and the mashed potatoes. Is there room on the table for a basket to hold everyone’s cell phones?

“You can put them in a basket, or on an empty chair or maybe in another room,” said Tetnika Williamson, a local etiquette instructor who endorses the national device-free dinner movement, which is making an extra push to ban mobile devices at America’s Thanksgiving Day meals.

“The point is, you want to set some boundaries.”

The history of the first Thanksgiving is muddled enough without speculating whether English colonists and their Native American dining companions were distracted by, say, a fisherman plying the waters of Cape Cod Bay. But modern Americans trying to have a civilized meal focused on family and friends certainly face plenty of competition.

“Families started to have difficulty when TV came on the scene,” said Barbara Gina Garrett, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist at Raleigh’s The Mindly Group. As televisions proliferated, families had to decide whether they would set up trays in the living room in front of “I Love Lucy” or gather at the table and show some love for one another.

“A lot of families made it a time when we would sit around and talk about our day and what is going on with us, and just visit with each other,” Garrett said. Over time, it’s grown harder to dedicate the dinner hour – or even a half-hour – to the people at the table. With so many scheduled activities, a shared meal becomes a lower priority, and when people do gather, they sneak their handheld electronics into their laps or park them next to their steak knives.

The device-free dinner campaign, launched in 2016 by Common Sense, a non-profit that advocates using technology to benefit children, acknowledges how tempting touch screens are versus actual human interaction.

This week, the campaign made a Thanksgiving push, posting a video on Twitter of a grandfather scanning his family members with a metal detector as they arrive for dinner. “Going to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving?” the post asks. “For the love of turkey, keep phones and tablets away from the table.”

It joins a series of 30-second video spots put together for the campaign featuring actor Will Ferrell as a smartphone-obsessed father. One of the bits begins with three kids and their mother at the dinner table. As Mom starts to serve the meal, the youngest daughter says, “I’m not hungry.” Her mother asks what’s wrong, and the the child answers, “I miss Daddy.”

Mom tries to console her by saying, “We all miss him,” but then the other children chime in and they argue over who misses him the most. Suddenly, the camera moves to the head of the table where Dad sits gazing into his phone.

“Shut up,” he says, without looking up. “This filter makes me look like a cat.”

The Ferrell spots on YouTube have been circulating on social media since October and can be see on the campaign’s website, which also offers what the organization sees as the benefits of device-free dinners, plus some tips on how to have them.

Among other things, it suggests developing a family media plan so that electronic activities don’t displace face-to-face interactions, family time, outdoor play, exercise, unplugged downtime and sleep. It’s endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

It also lists suggestions on “How to Save Yourself from Device Addiction.” These include saving a list of “Things to Google later,” and installing apps that monitor phone use – by adults.

For Williamson, who teaches etiquette to ’tweens, teens and adults at Poise Boutique in Cary, ditching devices for the short time it takes to share a meal is just good manners. Learning and practicing polite behavior makes it easier for people to be successful, she says.

“It’s teaching social skills,” Williamson said. Children may find parts of the dinner conversation to be over their heads, and adults may find parts of it uninteresting. “But you have to learn to adapt. The dining room table is there for you to connect with others, to talk, to have conversation, to make eye contact. You just cannot do that if you have a device at your fingertips.”

At a holiday dinner, Williamson says, it’s fine to use a phone to snap a quick group photo or a shot of the beautiful spread. After that, phones shouldn’t be seen again until people are dismissed from the table.

Big holiday meals are also where children learn how to show interest in a conversation and how to join in a group discussion without interrupting, says Garrett, the counselor.

Garrett, who enforces “Grandma time” when she takes her grandchildren out to eat, says that looking down at a device makes other people at the table feel less valued than whatever is on the screen.

“It makes the other person feel like, ‘I’m not interesting enough,’ or, ‘I’m not important enough,’” she said.

Holidays come with dangerously high expectations, she says, and they frequently fall short. Even so, people are willing to travel great distances to have a single meal with people they love.

“Bringing along those extraneous distractions is not showing that you care about those people.”

This story was originally published November 22, 2017 at 4:37 PM with the headline "Can you make it through Thanksgiving dinner without looking at your phone?."