Thanksgiving, also known as National Mooch Off Of Your Family Day, has turned into a pointless holiday in preparation for the Christmas season and improving the bottom line for multi-billion dollar companies. In fact, the first few Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades were actually entitled Macy’s Christmas Parade, so that one instance just goes to show that for big businesses, Thanksgiving is only useful to promote Black Friday.
Now, you will probably defend Thanksgiving as this all-powerful holiday that brings people together to give thanks for all the good things in life, but you don’t need an official holiday for this, and we shouldn’t have one. If we were all truly thankful for everything we have, we’d celebrate Thanksgiving every day.
Supposedly Thanksgiving is a time for families to come together, but again, if we all loved our families so much we’d make the effort to see each other and have dinner together more than twice a year.
Besides, Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until 1941, so if people thought having an official observance for such an idea was so important the holiday would’ve existed way before then, since the first traceable event of Thanksgiving occurred in 1621.
Like most holidays, Thanksgiving was actually a tradition that existed way before Europeans were plunked down on North America. Different Native American tribes have organized and carried out harvest festivals and ceremonies for centuries. Chalk up Thanksgiving as another stolen holiday that people think is totally American.
If I were Native American, I’d take offense to this holiday almost as much as I would Columbus Day. If this celebration was to be a sign of future cooperation between colonists and the Wampanoag tribe, the pilgrims really had a messed up definition of cooperation.
The bottom line is that Halloween rolls around and everyone goes out to buy ghoulishly themed candy and the next day all the displays are converted into Christmas trees, singing snowmen, and dancing penguins. People really don’t care about Thanksgiving in the way that they’d like us to believe, and it’s time to stop putting up the facade that we do.
