Thanksgiving is a real holiday

Every year I  hear people say “Thanksgiving isn’t a real holiday, it just means the beginning of the Christmas season.” But giving thanks for all you have is something worth celebrating. Christmas is a great holiday, but does it really need two months to be celebrated? Taking a day to be thankful is something everyone should do.

For me, Thanksgiving means being with my family and acknowledging all that I have to be thankful for.

A great thing about this holiday is that it comes with an abundance of food that we can eat. This is the one holiday where you can eat and eat and not be judged. It is a holiday that brings people together to have a good time, celebrate what they are thankful for and eat good food. I mean who doesn’t love a holiday where you can eat?

Thanksgiving shouldn’t be celebrated

Thanksgiving is supposed to be about giving thanks to friends, family, the world, the harvest and all of life’s flotsam and jetsam that may hold some meaning for us: over the past few years, however, I’ve been running out of thanks to give.

I’m not thankful for constant political kerfuffles at the dinner table; I’m not thankful for nonconsensual hugging from my great-great grandmother’s 2nd cousin twice removed (who I don’t remember in the slightest); I’m not thankful that my astonishingly white, Midwestern family tries to make casseroles out of cornflakes, pineapple slices and what looks like the mysterious gunk from the sewage drain.

I’m not feeling any togetherness, and I’m especially not feeling any reciprocated thanks from my surroundings as of late.

Thanksgiving break is like a filler arc in a show that ran out of plot points 20 years ago; people are truly only thankful for a handful of days off of school and Christmas on the horizon. Something is clearly missing from Thanksgiving tradition: the missing link that could genuinely make this bumtastically drab holiday a worthy contender against the typical gung-ho yuletide festivities. What is that missing link, you ask? I have no idea. So, let’s collectively come up with a way to make everyone thankful for Thanksgiving again.