ThanksChristmasGiving

This time of year always brings conflicting emotions for me.  On the one hand, I absolutely love the Christmas season.  I love the fact that I can enjoy a Christian holiday with quasi-pagan traditions and can be secretly more excited about the changing of seasons than I am about anything else.  I can enjoy family traditions and shoveling the driveway, we fluff the tree and hang lights on the bushes, it's all very festive and wonderfully cozy.  The problem, for me, is this little holiday called Thanksgiving, in which we completely overindulge on tons of food and try and act like we're thankful for things after throwing half the food away because we can. It's really just a thorn because Thanksgiving causes people to get uppity about when you are and are not allowed to put up your Christmas tree or listen to Christmas music.  People will flood Facebook with their righteous indignation upon seeing a Christmas display at the mall or Target because that's what Thanksgiving is for, getting pissed about Christmas being celebrated too early.

Basically all of this boils down to Thanksgiving being a terrible holiday.  For one, if we need a holiday to remind us to be thankful for things then we're already screwed.  For two, it's predicated on a ridiculous story about native people sharing with inept and intrusive Europeans who would later kill and steal form them all in the name of god and country.  This is a great holiday.  Let's remember to be thankful for all of that killing and stealing.  Besides, Thanksgiving comes courtesy of some of the worst culinary inventions in history.  What other time of the year is a dinner table graced with the presence of Green Been Casserole, Yams and Cranberries of which you are expected to mash all together and eat with something approximating pleasure.  I don't understand these things so mostly I just eat rolls and quietly sit through dinner.  I'm probably also shaking my head a lot and making rude comments, but that's beside the point.

The point is that Christmas is a far superior celebration than anything Thanksgiving can ever hope to muster out of it's sad revisionist history and apocryphal story telling.  Mind you, I'm not referring to Coca-Cola-commercialized-spend-to-your-absolute-limit-and-then-some-Christmas.  I'm talking about candle light midnight church service in which you sing carols and tell stories.  I'm talking about early morning breakfast that is both simple and wonderful all at once.  I'm talking about sharing gifts and lives and time and board games and general merriment involving good beer and conversation.  There's snow on the ground, it's pleasantly cold out, hot cocoa abounds and you can simply sit and be with people instead of feeling rushed by the next day's shopping extravaganza.  Life can take a break and you have a moment to breathe and relax and just be.  Why should I wait until after Thanksgiving to be excited about that?

Bottom line: Thanksgiving misses out on being the worst holiday only because Columbus Day is, inexplicably, still a real thing...yay European imperialism.

X-Mas 4 Life