My hot take for the morning is that Independence Day is not actually the USA's most patriotic holiday—Thanksgiving is. The Fourth of July has lots of flag waving Uncle Sam bullshit, yes, but the idea of it remains purely abstract. Even the "Freedom is not free" crowd are mostly just posturing to justify their own traumatic life decisions. On the other hand, July 4 is marked by a weird but undeniable anti-authoritarian tendency, wherein a strong plurality in this country basically say Fuck the Police and engage in reckless criminality (ie: fireworks smuggling and renegade displays).
Thanksgiving was explicitly invented as a nationalist holiday, and I think it serves this purpose in more concrete ways than the Fourth: glorifying the theft of Native lands, euphemizing the massacre of Native peoples, and fortifying the genocidal urge by redirecting its positive energies into the (implicitly white) nuclear family unit, thereby internalizing the task of nation-building and assigning specific heteronormative roles toward its realization.
Thanksgiving also has better food, for whatever that's worth.
Thanksgiving also proposes a more "democratic" and active form of patriotism. Rather than exhorting people to feel good about a symbolic action taken by a handful of elites hundreds of years ago, or to Thank Our Troops for taking often ambiguous and ambivalent actions halfway around the globe, Thanksgiving prescribes a set of actions that everyday people can take to invest in the Nation.