Ryan Donlin
Halloween has ended and now we have Christmas to look forward to! Wait, what was that? I forgot about Thanksgiving? Shame on me.
Every year after Halloween, there is a group of people who become self-righteous about how Thanksgiving is forgotten every year in favor of Christmas. Now, I get it. Thanksgiving is dear to many people, but using this as a way to prove some kind of moral superiority over those who seem to forget about Thanksgiving is just plain irritating.
These people post statuses on Facebook saying things like “Now that Halloween is over, unlike a good portion of America, I look forward to Thanksgiving, which is still in fact a holiday before Christmas” or “I always dread November. I love the month—and Thanksgiving, but I hate being bombarded by Christmas the minute Halloween is over. Stop the madness!”
This anger seems incredibly misplaced, in my opinion. Thanksgiving just happens to come at a really inconvenient time, right in the middle of two of the biggest, most anticipated holidays of the year. It’s not that people don’t care about Thanksgiving, or don’t acknowledge it as a holiday, it’s just not at the top of everybody’s list. There’s no need for people to get angry and take their anger on others just because they don’t give Thanksgiving the same amount of attention.
This brings up a problem that I have noticed in social media culture—no one seems able to mind their own business. Social media makes many people become involved in other people’s lives, and as a consequence, sometimes these people start criticizing these people for things like forgetting about Thanksgiving.
If these high and mighty Facebook Thanksgiving disciples focused more of their time on preparing for the holiday itself and less time on criticizing those who don’t agree with them, they’d have a lot more to be thankful for. Thanksgiving is, after all, a holiday devoted towards expressing the gratitude that you have for the things in your life.
So, if you happen to be one of these people who gets filled with unbridled rage any time another person forgets about Thanksgiving, remember that you haven’t forgotten Thanksgiving, and you probably do have something important to be thankful for.