I LOVE holiday season. To me, there is nothing better than seeing the festivity and love and tradition that comes with the end of the year. I have always taken comfort in the fact that by the time Halloween rolls around, the festivities are getting ready to begin. In our society, however, I think there has been a shift from the tradition and good spirit that I associate with the holidays to a greedy, self-serving delight found in the holiday season. Now, we see Christmas decorations arriving on store shelves before Halloween has even come and passed. We skip the thankfulness of Thanksgiving and the joy of seeing children all decked out for Halloween.
It is my belief that this trend is not indicative of a lack of reverence for the holidays, but a general lack of reverence for the people in our lives. We post on our social media, desperate for likes and comments and attention. We constantly take cute pictures, but are we taking these to treasure memories with our loved ones or to post on Insta and prove to others that we are relevant? We treat our relationships as things that can be thrown away. In another era, we fixed things that were broken, but everyone knows that they can just replace things that no longer work for them. I'm certainly guilty of these things at times, and my guess is that most other people are too.
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Previously, Thanksgiving was a chance to roll out the red carpet for all of one's loved ones. It was an all day event where, though we may have to deal with uncomfortable relatives, we were dedicated to spending quality time with our family. Now, we start Black Friday shopping on Thanksgiving. What message are we sending to our loved ones? That they aren't worth as much to us as shopping? On Christmas, we wait more eagerly for our gifts than our families. Where did the love go? I don't know, but I think it's time to reflect and decide how to make the people in our lives a priority again. Let's put the thanks back into Thanksgiving.
