We celebrate a number of different holidays in the United States. Holidays such as, Christmas, The Fourth of July and St. Patrick’s Day always involve big parties and celebrations, while others such as Veteran’s Day are more about remembrance.
Thanksgiving is a particularly weird holiday for a number of reasons. For starters, it walks somewhat of a fine line between being a celebration holiday, and being a day about family and remembrance.
In addition, Thanksgiving is a holiday that gets overlooked in the world of retail. For example, I work at Walmart, and as soon as the calendar changed to November 1st, we had taken all of our Halloween merchandise down, and went into full Christmas mode.
But why is this the case? I mean, everybody loves Thanksgiving, right? Thanksgiving brings great food, football games, and the Macy’s Parade (my personal favorite). Even beyond this, the holiday is the perfect time to catch up with friends and family. Most people are either home from college or off of work, so everybody is able to really spend time together for the first time since Summer.
I believe there are two reasons for this: One being the fact that Thanksgiving just isn’t as marketable as any of the other holidays. I mean, outside of turkeys and general Fall merchandise, what do you really sell for Thanksgiving?
Just about every other holiday has at least a few special products that are intrinsically associated with the day. Christmas trees, Valentine’s cards, costumes for Halloween, American flags for the Fourth of July; the other holidays have no shortage of product to sell.
To go a bit further, Thanksgiving doesn’t really have many notable movies or television specials. I can name dozens of specials for every other holiday, but when it comes to Thanksgiving, the only one I can really think of is A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.
The second reason is the fact that we don’t really acknowledge the meaning of Thanksgiving in a meaningful way. For example, a large part of what we consider Christmas to be, has to do with presents, and Valentine’s Day is all about love and romance. Thanksgiving is about being thankful for the things that we have in life. In that sense, there are some people that celebrate Thanksgiving every day that they wake up.
For many people, Thanksgiving is just an excuse to eat way too much food and hang out with friends and family, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. After all, I’d say that most people are thankful to have their loved ones, as well as a full stomach.
Thanksgiving is a really special holiday, one that often gets unfairly overlooked. This is due in part to the incredibly fast paced retail world, as well as how tightly it’s packed between Halloween and Christmas, the two biggest holidays of the year. But that doesn’t mean that Thanksgiving should be forgotten about. It’s a really special holiday, with a fairly simple premise: be thankful for all that you have been given in life.
