2017-11-22_Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving day is tomorrow, and despite Christmas music on the radio and decorations up all over the place, it is still a celebrated holiday.

I understand that Christmas is a lot easier to get excited for than Thanksgiving. For one, it has tons and tons of music. I don’t have any sort of tentative figures on it, but I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of Christmas songs just in English. How many songs have you ever heard about Thanksgiving.

In addition to the music, Christmas decorations are as prolific and varied as holidays get. There are trees and ribbons and lights and garland and even flying spaghetti monster tree toppers. With so many decorations available, you can doll up your house and yard however you want. The sky's the limit, often literally with the size of some Christmas trees I’ve seen.

Let’s not forget presents. The holiday season brings people out of the woodwork to go shopping, and companies often hold off new releases until late in the year, just to entice people to buy the products as gifts. I don’t want to sound materialistic, but everybody enjoys receiving presents. Even if it isn’t the reason for the season, it is a nice addition.

Far from the least, Christmas shares a time of the year with numerous other religious holidays. For many people, religion is a defining element of who they are. As such, they get very passionate about specific days for their faith. With Christmas as the birth of Christ, that’s a pretty big deal for Christians.

With all these reasons, I can totally see why people like to skip right over Thanksgiving and hop right on board the Christmas train when November 1st rolls around. But I genuinely think that Thanksgiving has a few things in its favor to deserve a fair share of the holiday cheer.

My personal biggest reason for enjoying Thanksgiving is how it hasn’t been commercialized, at least not as thoroughly as Christmas. With the presents and decorations and such, Christmas is all about buy buy buy. With Thanksgiving, I don’t feel like that’s the case. You’re encouraged to cook a big dinner for family and friends, but there isn’t really much TO buy. And there’s the dynamic between Black Friday shopping creeping backwards into Thursday, versus companies making a political statement against it and publicly announcing that they will be closed until into the day on Friday. In recent years, more and more companies seem to encourage their employees to spend time with their families. I’ve always had a very close knit family, so I really like that Thanksgiving allows me to put aside everything and spend time with people I love, if only for a few hours.

Beyond the sentiment of time with family, Thanksgiving is all about some food. Looking at my stature, it’s rather obvious that I enjoy food, perhaps a bit too much. I like turkey and dressing, I like mac and cheese, I like just about everything that most people serve on Thanksgiving. Given the plethora of options available and the moral obligation against criticising people for what they eat or how much, Thanksgiving is a chance to pig out and not feel guilty about it. Maybe it’s unhealthy, but what’s one day a year going to hurt?

This Thanksgiving, be thankful. I’m not asking you to post on social media every day of November about what you’re thankful for. I don’t even care if you voice it to anybody else. But take the day to remember what you have, and appreciate it. Come Friday, feel free to go full-on Christmas. But until then, give Thanksgiving its due.