Whatever Happened to Thanksgiving?

Articles

Craig Chamberlain

Whatever Happened to Thanksgiving?
Nov 24, 2003

Yes, I know the day is still observed, its on the calendar. But that doesn't mean that it gets what it deserves. I saw a cartoon in my local newspaper that about summed it up. It showed a turkey in the road after it had been run over. A policeman asked who did it and a man said a jolly old man in a red suit driving a sleigh pulled by 8 reindeer. Thats the problem, we don't take the year one holiday at a time.

You see I was doing my Christmas shopping the other day. I thought to myself: here I am in November, before Thanksgiving running around a shopping mall buying people presents. Now don't get me wrong I am not against Christmas, yet. You see Christmas has been hijacked. It used to be the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Now it was always celbrated, but always in a Christian fashion.(by that I mean most people remembered why december 25th was important) Today we start the Christmas season after Halloween. We don't celebrate anything we just prepare ourselves until we almost have a nervous breakdown.

There are two culprits for this. One is the merchants. Now I have nothing against businessmen, I have no problem with free enterprise. I studied business in college in fact. However I think it is wrong to extend a holiday, a religious holiday at that, to make a quick buck. The second culprit is secularist liberal. People who can't stand religion in anyway shpe, or form. They turned the celebration of the birth of Jesus into a mere winter celebration. Now, they have a bunch of weak arguments for this. One is that we live in a multicultural society and to have an explicitly Christian holiday is biased against non Christians. I can't express how much the thought of a Muslim or an atheist feelig left out upsets me. The other and more insiduous force is that eventually they want Christmas to no longer be an official holiday.

Now back to Thanksgiving. The reason it gets ignored by merchants and secuarlists is they figure that if they don't pay any attention to it it will simply go away. Businessmen can't make any money off Thanksgiving, there is just no way to commercialize it and it can't be secuarlized either. Oh they try. They try to turn it into a celbration of the Indian saving the simpleton puritan. But that is weak. The Puritans met with the Indians to give thanks to God. So all there efforts are focused on ignoring it and passing it over and going to a nice safe secular and commercial holiday.

Every Christmas I see signs that say: Remember the reason for the season. We need something like that for Thanksgiving to, before it becomes a day just to stuff ourselves.

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Email Craig Chamberlain: craig_chamberlain@hotmail.com

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