Christmas is easily one of my most favorite days of the year. I haven't really matured much since I turned five and I still get absolutely swept away by the magic of the season. I love every aspect of Christmas: the snowy days, the heightened sense of family, the secrets whispered in the halls about all the perfect gifts you purchased for your loved ones, the coziness of a fire in the fireplace with a cup of eggnog in your hand, the music, the baking, the memory making...I could rave on and on. But you know what other holiday I really love? Sorry, this is a trick question because the answer is all of them. And when a specific holiday steps on another holiday's toes, I get downright disgruntled and cranky about it. This seems to happen with a good many holidays but one of the worst cases in the United States of holiday neglect would be when Christmas overshadows Thanksgiving.
It seems like earlier and earlier in the year Christmas products begin popping up like weeds in department stores. Alarmingly enough, this year I saw Santa stuff before Halloween was over. That is a full 2 months early...why in the world would we as Americans need that much preparation for a holiday? My family doesn't get around to putting up lights and decorations until a week before Christmas, if that. In addition to completely disregarding Thanksgiving, stores are now allowing Halloween to be overshadowed as well. These holidays are important days of celebration for various reasons, hence the title "holiday." Thanksgiving is an incredibly historically important holiday to our country. It is a time to celebrate our American heritage, to give thanks for anything that you were individually may be grateful for, to recall a time when life was so much more simple and hosting a feast between two very different peoples was the ultimate gesture of kindness and friendship, and a reminder to look to the future with that same mentality. Honestly, I feel like Christmas has gotten too big and it is so commercialized its sickening but that's another blog for another day. But I think that it is disrespectful to disregard a time honored tradition and a day that promotes family time and values. The idea of Black Friday right after Thanksgiving is bad enough but now stores are not even waiting until Thanksgiving is over and opening their doors for Black Friday at 8pm on that Thursday. I don't know how to fix this problem at all but I personally don't pay attention to Christmas until Thanksgiving is over. That means no Christmas music yet, no eggnog, no shopping, nothing. And maybe if people started putting the same constraints on themselves, we would be able to bring Thanksgiving back from its current obsolete state.
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