Katie Samol | Managaing Editor | The Chronicle
As soon as Halloween ends and Americans flip calendars to November 1, our culture catapults into the holiday season. Displays at Target and the trim of neighbors’ roofs, radio stations and Starbucks menus, outlet malls and possibly your very own living room. Everything instantly embellished with holiday glee.
I understand the excitement and anticipation surrounding the holidays, and I, too, feel a tug toward the tendency, but society should slow its roll.
We need to give Thanksgiving its moment — to owe it the respect it deserves. Even if that is just a couple-day pause from holiday festivities. Thanksgiving is underrated, and when overshadowed by December’s excitement, the deeper, and deeply valuable, meaning behind the holiday can be lost.
I am not arguing for Thanksgiving’s case due to the holiday’s origins. Remember the story you may have learned in elementary school? A joyous feast between European settlers and the Wampanoag tribe, the groups setting aside their differences to share a meal together in gratitude — the First Thanksgiving. The reality is not so simple. This narrative glosses over the details and disregards the brutality Native Americans faced, romanticizing the relationship between colonizers and native people.
According to the government of the Potawatomi Native People, “teaching a false narrative of [Thanksgiving’s] beginnings perpetuates colonialism and ignores more than 400 years of atrocities committed against Native Americans and First Nations’ people.” This rose-tinted, rewritten history is not the deeper meaning behind Thanksgiving that I’m getting at.
Rather than using the day to commemorate the falsified community building and brotherhood of the “First Thanksgiving,” the holiday can take on a modernized purpose: acting as a celebration of gratitude and tradition with those we love.
December can arrive with much chaos. For me, the month means a slew of final exams, my dance studio’s production of The Nutcracker, family coming into town and preparing for and celebrating Christmas, to name just a few factors. The month kicks off and does not let up until we reach an entirely new calendar year.
Thanksgiving offers Americans a day, and for Mason City Schools students, a week, to take a breath before schedules can get hectic. What other holiday celebrates a tradition and theme as mentally healthy? Research from the American Brain Foundation suggests that regular gratitude reduces anxiety and depressive symptoms, helps develop a more positive mindset, strengthens social bonding and can even improve quality of sleep. The holiday provides a day to recenter our focus on the present moment. A day revolving around the people and gifts that we already have to be grateful for.
I acknowledge that a huge dinner with extended family may not seem the most relaxing to many people. Conversations can grow stale, giving way to boredom, or political, leading to tense dinner tables. But this is not all that Thanksgiving has to be. Friendsgiving celebrations have risen in popularity for a reason, creating an opportunity to share a meal with “chosen family,” whoever you are truly most grateful for.
Another reason our friends and family overlook Thanksgiving? Companies do the same, jumping from pumpkins, skeletons and heaps of halloween candy straight to holiday lights, Christmas trees and endless presents. Thanksgiving is difficult to market. Beyond pumpkins and food, which can only be promoted on shelves until the best-by date, products that companies are able to successfully market for Thanksgiving are scarce. While the commercialization of Halloween, Christmas and New Year’s is evident, our capitalistic system sees a slim opportunity for profit within Thanksgiving. So, they skip it. A holiday centered around being thankful for what we already have? That will never do.
This makes me love it that much more. Thanksgiving is not about what items you are going to receive — how much candy you can collect, what you’re getting from your growing wish list or what you’re buying to wear to that New Year’s Eve Party — but about celebrating the gifts that we already have to be grateful for.
