With Halloween behind us, the ghosts, witches, and spiderwebs removed from the neighborhood lawns, it's time to focus on the next holiday. This time of year is always busy, with multiple holidays of massive cultural importance (for many different religions) falling so close together. So as we pack away the costumes until next year, we bring out the decorations for...Christmas?
Maybe I'm just naive, but I really remember there being another holiday in between. As a kid, there was nothing more exciting than not one, not two, but two and a half whole days off from school. It was the long weekend extreme. From a young age I learned in school that we were celebrating Thanksgiving to thank those who helped the Pilgrims survive on American soil, and we celebrated in style. We stuffed our faces with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and the seasonal favorite, pumpkin pie. I remember waking up and watching the entire Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in awe, amazed by the sheer size of the balloons that made their way through New York City. The parade was always followed by a day of football, when we watched game after game. My family, as loyal Jets fans, cringed together watching the infamous butt-fumble of 2012. And if you're the type to wake up at 4 a.m., "push through the crowd to find the clothes" kind of shopper, there were the hugely discounted Black Friday sales to look forward to bright and early the next morning.
It's funny, but everyone seems to be in such a rush to celebrate Christmas, with the lights and the presents and the jolly bearded man in a red suit that we've almost forgotten about Thanksgiving. Within a week of Halloween there were men working to wrap lampposts with Christmas lights. Now, while I do love some nice Christmas lights, this seems to be jumping the gun a bit. The highly anticipated, extremely hyped-up pumpkin spice latte is already losing favor to the peppermint mocha. Starbucks has already debuted their highly controversial Christmas-themed cups, though the relation to Christmas is being hotly debated by Christians because the cups do not contain any overt Christmas-related symbols. So while the cups don't have any red-nosed reindeer or jingling Christmas ornaments, these red and green cups definitely ring of "Jingle Bells."
What really gets me, though, is the music. You know who you are, playing Christmas music on repeat in the common room even though we all know Christmas is not for another month and a half. It's not even like a one-time, guilty pleasure listen. It's a marathon of bells and songs about the snow and the presents. I get it, in December, in the week before Christmas, Christmas music is going to be entirely unavoidable, taking up about every song on almost every radio station known to mankind. And I think I can handle that. As I'm writing this, the nice folks at Spotify are advertising their Christmas playlists, to ensure that we, the loyal listeners, are not left without proper tunes for this coming Christmas. While I really appreciate it Spotify, ask me again in a month.
This holiday season, let's not forget Thanksgiving. Let's not forget to be thankful for all the great things in our life, something we often forget to do. Let's not forget the joy of the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the time spent with family, especially those family members you haven't seen all year (for good and for bad; that crazy aunt will give you some great stories). Let's not forget to stuff ourselves with a food baby, I swear I'll go to the gym every day next week, I'm never eating again, silly. And finally, let's not forget this very important PSA from Nordstrom:
