Hey everyone, there’s only forty days until Christmas! Don’t look now but Hanukkah is here in 23 days! And for those of you who really like a good time, Kwanzaa is just 41 days away! So many awesome holidays are so soon! Our holiday season is going to be full of cheer and presents and caroling and—wait, what? I’m forgetting something, you say?
Right. Thanksgiving.
As our bustling excitement builds towards the holiday season, we completely overlook a very important and meaningful holiday. While there’s no denying the sanctity of Christmas and Hanukkah, it’s a shame to see such a great holiday like Thanksgiving go underappreciated.
In an age where a completely commercialized Christmas has become almost solely about the fat guy in a suit bringing you presents, Thanksgiving provides us with a special time to be with family and pay homage to a critical moment in the founding of our country.
Think about it. Without the journey of the Mayflower from Plymouth, England to Cape Cod in 1620, we wouldn’t even be able to practice our beloved Christmas or Hanukkah traditions. In fact, those pilgrims came across the pond to escape religious persecution and to practice one simple ideal: religious freedom.
Despite the obvious historical importance of this holiday, not to mention the incredible food we eat as we celebrate it, Thanksgiving gets completely overlooked. Saying that it gets the short end of the stick is as large an understatement as saying that listening to WLIT’s two-straight months of Christmas music is only mildly annoying.
People get more excited for Black Friday than Thanksgiving. It’s just wrong that Americans get more pumped to wake up at 3:30 AM and speed to a bloodthirsty mob of shoppers than spend a wonderful, cozy evening calmly eating with their family.
There are plenty of ways that Thanksgiving not only stands up to Christmas, but trumps it as well. First and foremost, there’s the food. There is not a single day of the year that stands up to Thanksgiving aside from IHOP’s annual free all-you-can-eat pancake day. Just kidding. But seriously, what’s better, fresh turkey with creamy mashed potatoes and thick pumpkin pie or the taste of your own salty tears after your mom mistakenly bought you a second copy of “Assassin’s Creed II” for Christmas?
Secondly, there’s the sports on TV. Thanksgiving brings late-season NFL action, with the suddenly competitive Detroit Lions and the never great, but always exciting Dallas Cowboys playing every year. Christmas brings some always-bland regular season NBA games where we get to watch Kobe Bryant pretend to care about anything other than catching Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time scoring record and more opposing fans making outlandish claims about LeBron James.
Finally, Thanksgiving is for everyone. Those who celebrate Christmas will continue to make passive-aggressive comments about how their Hanukkah brethren get presents for eight days instead of just one. Those who celebrate Hanukkah will have eternally suppressed annoyance that Christmas gets so much publicity.
But on Thanksgiving, everyone can come together and eat horrifying amounts of food, watch hours of football, and share a wonderful time with their close and extended family that they will remember forever.
Turn off that Christmas jingle, hide the menorahs and pass the gravy. It’s time for Thanksgiving.