The holiday season is here. It used to be three separate occasions – Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Now it’s one long sprint to the finish. Those campaign ads will rapidly be replaced with ads suggesting your family cannot possibly have a good holiday unless you spend yourself into near bankruptcy.
I liked it better when these holidays were each their distinct own moment. But now Thanksgiving seems to be but a way station on the road to the exorbitant spending that occurs in an orgy of frantic shopping and leaves most people with that regretful hangover of surfeit physical possessions. Holiday decorations now appear in stores the day after Labor Day. Thanksgiving is a feast squeezed into a short hour or so before the mad rush for pre-Christmas sales.
I liked our Thanksgivings growing up. They were about food and family. No one was flexing their credit card muscles for use later that day. There was actually no place to use a credit card because nothing was open except for the occasional corner grocery store catering to whatever you forgot to buy for your favorite family recipe. Back then people actually believed that Thanksgiving was a day to spend in lively conversation over actual home cooked food. No one was keeping an eye on the clock for when the insane rush for bargains would begin. That would happen on Black Friday.
It’s sad that we seem to have lost Thanksgiving in our rush to out buy our neighbors. It’s sad that materialism has overtaken the one day a year when it never really mattered. You didn’t give presents on Thanksgiving. No one was expecting an envelope with a card and money stuffed in it. No one was expecting anything except a wonderful meal. I miss the leisurely pace that once was Thanksgiving. In my family, we drove sixty miles to join the rest of the relatives for the day. We ate, the men napped while pretending to watch football, the women did the dishes. The kids played, helped clean the table and then, because cleaning up took at least two hours, all the food went back on the table so everyone could have a snack before departing. The snack often took as long as the original meal given that the men had gotten their second wind by then. My aunt would then pack sandwiches for us to take in the car on the ride back home because you never knew how hungry you might get in the 90 minutes the drive took.
Somewhere from then to now, the spirit of materialism, sales and greed hijacked Thanksgiving. People who work for certain stores (that shall not be mentioned by name but do not pay their salespeople a living wage) are made to work the holiday if they want to keep their jobs. Great employers like Costco that consciously close on Thanksgiving and wish their employees a happy day with their families have become fewer and farther between.
I wish we could once again enjoy a time and place where each of these holidays was celebrated by itself, where one didn’t slosh over into the other while bringing with it a level of greedy materialism that is distinctly unappealing as a national trait. But that’s probably never going to happen so let me make this suggestion instead.
If you are going to basically give up the relaxation of a day filled with food, friends and family in order to be part of a crazed horde trying to push into a store to get something you probably don’t need at a price that seems to be a bargain only if you ignore the family time you’re missing, then at least do this too. Before you start the shopping, before you max out your credit card, before you go into the kind of debt that will take until next Christmas to pay off, look around at the many charities and causes in our community from the Food Bank to Brother Francis Shelter to Bird TLC. Make a conscious decision to either put aside money for them at the holiday or put aside hours for volunteering. At least in that way, some of the spirit of the child being celebrated at Christmas will be able to squeeze through that horde of crazed shoppers and make the holiday season brighter.