Tag: pilgrims

It’s Thanksgiving Season (#1)

Listen carefully… hear the clock a-tick-tick-ticking?  Better hurry up!  You’re already a day (or more) into the Thanksgiving season and you have so much to do!  “No Dave”, you correct me, “Thanksgiving’s just one day (or at most a long weekend) way-ay-ay at the end of the month… I still have plenty of time to prepare!”  No you don’t.  Junk that perception, online friends, because the times they are a-changin’.  I, blogger Dave, hereby decree Thanksgiving to be three weeks… and the season’s already underway.  So c’mon – get grateful already!

It’s fitting I’m writing this post on Halloween, “… the conclusion of spooky season…” as Lyssy in the City referred to it.  And isn’t it true?  Just like Christmas, the air goes out of the holiday balloon the very next day.  Cinderella’s carriage turns back into a pumpkin at midnight (ironically).  There is no “residual” spooky season on November 1st.  Halloween died the night before.

Retailers are determined to steamroll Halloween and Thanksgiving with the Christmas season, of course.  The artificial trees and decorations were available for purchase at Costco and Lowes this year before the Halloween candy even colored the shelves.  As I said in Third-Wheel Meal two years ago, Thanksgiving is fighting an uphill battle between the ever-expanding seasons before and after.  It’s like a sandwich with two massive pieces of bread but not much in between.

Thanksgiving is not just another holiday in my book; it’s a uniquely American holiday.  It’s the one we’ve been celebrating in the U.S. for 160 years thanks to the persistence of one Sarah Josepha Hale (who also wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb”). Hale, along with Abraham Lincoln’s stroke of the presidential pen, made sure the holiday was “permanent… an American custom and institution”.  Gives this juncture in the holiday season a little more respect, wouldn’t you say?

Day-by-day gratitude

Like an Advent calendar, I propose we take twenty-three days to be grateful for what we have.  Open the little cardboard door on any given morning of November and the question will always be the same: What are you thankful for today?  Surely you can come up with twenty-three things.  Or how about twenty-three people?  Wouldn’t it be something if you told one person how grateful you are to have them in your life… every day until Thanksgiving Day?

Already on the shelves, sigh…

As with Christmas, it’s not the wrapping; it’s the gift inside.  Thanksgiving goes way deeper than turkey and football.  If you’re planning a trip to America and don’t know much about Thanksgiving, VisitTheUsa.com is not helping my cause.  The website reduces Thanksgiving into turkey and pie, Turkey Trots, parades, football, the pardoning of a single turkey, “shop ’til you drop”, and the travel challenges of a four-day weekend.  Really?  That’s the meaning of America’s Thanksgiving?

It’s not about this…

Maybe it would help if moviemakers and songwriters joined my cause.  I mean, think about it.  Halloween movies come to mind without much thought (with some, like A Nightmare on Elm Street, approaching ten sequels).  Hallmark churns out Christmas movies faster than you churn out Christmas cookies.  But are there any movies about Thanksgiving?  Well, yes actually, just this year we have Thanksgiving (the movie).  But please, don’t seek out the trailer.  This garbage has nothing to do with gratitude and everything to do with gratuitous violence.

or this…

I was going to make the same case for music. Halloween has you dancing to “Thriller” and “Monster Mash”.  Christmas has you “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”.  There is no “Thanksgiving carol”.  But then I remembered Amy Grant’s “‘Til the Season Comes ‘Round Again” (my wife’s favorite).  It’s a song about Christmas, make no mistake, but you could argue there’s a little Thanksgiving dressing mixed into the first verse:

Come and gather around at the table
In the spirit of family and friends
And we’ll all join hands and remember this moment
‘Til the season comes ’round again

Get what I’m saying?  Take the next three weeks and find the true meaning of Thanksgiving.  Like Halloween, the treats will still be there on November 23rd.  Like Christmas, you’ll still have the stress of travel and getting things done.  Those holidays are about finding your inner child.  This one’s about finding your inner adult.  So c’mon – get grateful already!

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

A Distant Third

America’s Election Day finds us one week post-Halloween, fifty days pre-Christmas, and still adjusting to that pesky hour gained from the loss of Daylight Savings Time (got all that?) Fittingly, I’m working through a small pile of candy corn and M&M’s while placing a couple of online orders for holiday gifts. And that, my friends, is the perfect lead-in to today’s topic. With Halloween fading fast as the sun, and Christmas approaching like Starbucks’ holiday cups (just when did those show up already?), where in God’s name is the love of Thanksgiving?

Of course, Thanksgiving gets steamrolled every year between the other two loudmouths – just seems the real estate on either side is getting bigger. Our neighborhood’s professional haunted houses, pumpkin patches, and corn mazes opened gates in early September. Then Christmas’ onslaught of decor, music, and retail made its entrance the moment front-porch lights switched off on trick-or-treating. In short, Holiday 1 and Holiday 3 officially overlapped each other, suffocating Holiday 2 onto life support. It’s the classic case of middle-child syndrome – “exclusion caused by the more specific attention to the others”. Poor Thanksgiving.

To be fair, ranking the standard aspects of holidays puts Thanksgiving in third place in just about every category.  Let’s review a few:

ORIGIN: Halloween dates to 2,000 years ago; the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (in present-day Ireland), when people lit bonfires and wore costumes to ward off ghosts. That’s pretty cool.  Thanksgiving dates a mere 400 years, mimicking the harvest meal shared by the Wampanoag Indians and English Pilgrims. Christmas – at least to us Christians – dates over 2,000 years ago to the birth of Christ. Measured by the calendar then, Christmas (C) takes first place, Halloween (H) second, and Thanksgiving (T) a distant third.

CELEBRATION: Halloween used to be just children’s trick-or-treating. Now we’ve evolved to a month of the aforementioned haunted houses, pumpkin patches, and corn mazes; then costume contests, themed drinks, and increased cover charges at the bars; and a plethora of scary movies at the theater. Thanksgiving?  One day preparing one meal to be consumed in (more or less) one hour.  Christmas has its December 25th, but it also has a season’s worth of caroling, parties, movies, concerts, parades, church services, craft shows, decorations, temporary ice-skating rinks, and on and on and on.  Again – First Place: C, Second: H, (Distant) Third: T.

MUSIC: Halloween: “Werewolves of London”, “The Time Warp”, “The Monster Mash”, “Ghostbusters”, “Thriller”. Christmas: You-pick-’em – a dozen of your favorites (from hundreds if not thousands of carols). Thanksgiving: Not one.  Not one single, solitary tune comes to mind. First Place: C, Second: H, Late-to-the-party: T.

COLORS: Halloween: Red, Orange, Yellow (and every shade in between). Thanksgiving: brown. Christmas: Red, Green, White. Let’s call it a first-place tie between C and H.  In third place (and looking awfully uncolorful): T.

APPAREL – Let’s give this category about five seconds. Halloween is all about apparel, so anything goes and everything works. Christmas allows for – at least once in the season – your Sunday best, or getting all dolled up for some special occasion. Thanksgiving? All I come up with is stretch pants to ease the digestion of the meal.  First place: H, Second place: C, Absent-From-The-Podium: T.

FOOD – Halloween brings forth every imaginable candy, with a side of bobbed apples and witch’s brew. Christmas explodes with candy canes, decorated cookies, the Grinch’s roast beast, and those wretched fruit cakes. But here comes Thanksgiving for the kill – turkey, stuffing, potatoes, cranberries, dinner rolls, salads, vegetables, two-maybe-three kinds of pie, and whatever else you can cram onto the table. Assuming this carb-crazy feast is your cup of tea, Thanksgiving wins in a runaway. First place: T, Second place: C, Third Place (+ Sugar Coma): H.

Let’s tally the results.  In five of six categories, Thanksgiving gets the beat-down from Halloween and Christmas.  The mega-holidays appear to be reducing Turkey Day to a trifle.  But lest you think it’s a dying bird, I’m here to convince you Thanksgiving isn’t down for the count.  Stay tuned: there’s more to discuss about the little holiday that could.