How come there's a children's table at Thanksgiving?

On this side of the room, the kid's table. Where the youngsters talk about The Marvel Universe, Olivia Rodrigo, skibidi toilet. Kid stuff.

On this side of the room, the adult table. Where the grown-ups talk about property taxes, plumbers, and grandpa's sciatica. Adult stuff.

That's Thanksgiving. At least in many homes — where an old-fashioned demarcation line is in effect. Young folks on one side of the room. Old folks on the other.

"The kid's table" is something that a lot of people grew up with. So it would seem, anyway, from the nostalgic portrait filmmaker Barry Levinson painted in his 1990 movie "Avalon." Or consider Woody Allen's remark, when asked, in 1980, why he had stopped making comedies: "When you do comedy, you're not sitting at the grown-ups' table, you're sitting at the children's table."

Even so, the children's table is pretty much contrary to the spirit of Thanksgiving as originally understood, said Melanie Kirkpatrick, author of the 2016 book "Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience."

"If you go back to the early days of thanksgiving, the kids were very much part to the holiday," she said.

An all-ages event

In "Northwood," the 1827 novel by Sarah Josepha Hale — Thanksgiving's greatest 19th century champion — the November feast was described as the one great event when children and their parents would actually sit down together.

"The table, covered with a damask cloth…was now intended for the whole household, every child having a seat on this occasion," Hale wrote.

And the youngsters were over the moon — so Hale tells us — about the idea of actually being in the dining room with mama and papa. Evidently, the place was off-limits, most of the time.

"I imagine they ate in the kitchen, and on a special day like Thanksgiving they would eat in the parlor or dining room," Kirkpatrick said.

The very act of setting foot in the dining room was, for a child of 1827, apparently mind-blowing.

"Seldom were the junior members of the family allowed the high privilege of stepping on the carpet, excepting at the annual festival; and their joy at the approaching feast was considerably heightened by the knowledge that it would be holden in the best room," Hale wrote.

Naturally, it was not intended that children join in the conversation. Or — worse — divert it to topics more congenial to the young.

Children were to listen silently, and respectfully, to their elders and betters. Even Robert Louis Stevenson, more child-friendly than many writers of the period, was clear on this point: "A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table, At least as far as he is able." Stevenson wrote in 1885.

Kids, in other words, could be present — as long as they were as nearly invisible as possible.

Kids speak for themselves

In the 20th century, a radical notion began to take hold. Why not let kids be kids? More and more frequently, children were permitted to speak for themselves. Boys and girls, to use the modern term, were starting to have "agency." And, on an occasion like Thanksgiving, that presented a problem.

Adults, after all, like to talk about stock options, politics, and respiratory ailments. Kids like to talk about Santa Claus, boogers, and baseball cards.

And that's not all. Adults drone. Children wriggle and shriek. Adults doze. Children can barely keep in their chairs.

Each was likely to be impatient with the others' conversation. So — probably to the relief of both parties — a lot of homes took to segregating the Thanksgiving feast, demographically.

Ideally — officially — as in the famous 1943 Norman Rockwell picture, Thanksgiving was still a meal where the whole family sat together.

But in reality, kids of the 20th century often found themselves sitting apart — either at one end of the long table, or at separate ones of their own. To graduate to the adult table became a rite of passage — like the day when a boy, in an earlier age, got his first pair of long pants.

Today, that line between adult and child is starting to blur again. We live in an era when grown men read comic books, and a 10-year-olds can quote every F-bomb from The Geto Boys. Kids are acting older, and adults are acting younger, than ever before. Which may or may not be a good thing.

But on one day a year, at least, the old distinctions still hold.

At the Thanksgiving table, kids will be kids, and adults will be adults — and never the twain shall mix.

And for that — as for so many other things —perhaps we should give thanks.