What’s the purpose of Thanksgiving? I’d be lying if I said I actually knew or cared. I didn’t even realize it was supposed to be a religious holiday until I looked it up on Wikipedia. For me, Thanksgiving has always been pretty stale. My parents buy a turkey and then we end up eating it along with rice (which is an awful idea; cranberry sauce tastes awful with rice). Somewhere along the way, we realize that it’s really hard to eat an entire turkey when the extended family lives 8,000 miles away, so we end up eating leftover turkey for a week or so.
In any case, the meaning behind the holiday doesn’t really exist anymore… just like every other holiday we happen to celebrate. This isn’t really anything new or revolutionary, and it’s probably been said at least a hundred times, if not more. Then again, Thanksgiving really has become a truly American holiday, in a way. We eat things, get fat and then we wait hours outside to buy material goods that we probably don’t need. It sums up our culture pretty well.
Why am I even writing this? I’m sure we’re all tired of this by now. There really, really, isn’t anything new to talk about. We all know about the 30-year-old men that take toys from children on Black Friday and the people that are trampled yearly. There’s enough about overeating and fat Americans and everything else that has to do with Thanksgiving.
I kind of want to complain, but honestly; I don’t really mind. Every holiday we celebrate has become commercialized, and Thanksgiving is really no different. It’s very easy to make money when people are willing to buy everything and anything they see. At some point, you have to come to the realization that capitalism wins during the holiday season, and that’s okay. Everyone needs to make money, and companies aren’t really an exception.
What does this mean, though? The entire holiday season ends up pretty tired and uninteresting. We have Halloween, which is promptly followed up by Thanksgiving, after which Christmas is immediately advertised and sold to the American public. Of course, it works; they sell it, and we buy it every single time. American holidays are pretty stupid.
It’s kind of confusing when you’re supposed to get together with family and friends and give thanks for what you have, then go off and buy lots of things that you don’t need the next day. But either way, to each their own, right? There isn’t really a right or wrong. It’s not as if we ACTUALLY care about the pilgrims who settled centuries ago.
In the end, there really isn’t much of a point. We do the exact same things every year, most of which are pretty meaningless anyways. Some might go line up Friday morning, some might get together with their families. I’ll go eat my turkey with rice (ew) and take a nap afterwards. After all, it’s not a bad thing to just take things as is; to do what you please, rather then being caught up in a pointless holiday.
