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Thanksgiving is worth repeating
(by Barbara Christian - November 29, 2010)
WINDOW ON MAIN STREET, BY BARBARA CHRISTIAN
Thanksgiving is worth repeating
Since the Times did not arrive in the mail as it usually does on Thursday, it being Thanksgiving, you are likely reading this a day or two after the holiday. So please consider this a slightly belated greeting and hope that this year you had much for which to be thankful.
For many of us, Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday. It means being with loved ones or those we can at least tolerate a few hours every year.
Thanksgiving is also the most overlooked holiday, stuck as it is between Halloween and Christmas. Yes, even once simple Halloween has fallen victim to rampant commercialism.
Anymore, what seems to predicate the importance of a holiday is how wide and how often we are willing to open our wallets.
Maybe that's why we like Thanksgiving so much. It has escaped the buy, buy, buy hype. Aside from the turkey and trimmings, Thanksgiving is not centered on mass merchandising, gift giving and card sending.
If "they" could find a way to make a buck off Thanksgiving or Veterans Day or Memorial Day, for that matter, "they" would have by now.
Thanksgiving isn't even the starting gun for the Christmas season anymore, except for something called Black Friday. That's the ominous-sounding once-insider's jargon for the day after Thanksgiving -- code for turning ledger-book ink from red to black.
This year, Black Friday, which has become its own sub-holiday, became Black November, as retailers large and small try to change the economic climate from clouds and chill to clear and sunny.
But crowded stores and grasping bargain hunters seem a bad way to spend any day, particularly the day after Thanksgiving, as our turkey-induced coma lingers and our digestive system struggles to regain equilibrium. Why would we want to go from basking in the glow of our blessings to cursing traffic around the mall.
Predictably, television crews will be out on that day interviewing shoppers, who will, also predictably, enthuse over whatever it was they were able to buy at a less-inflated price. Pssst, if they could just hold out longer, they could get an even lower inflated price.
Personally, I suspect Black Friday may have been concocted by psychological behaviorists studying Pavlovian responses in human beings.
But there we go again, way off the subject. What I really meant to tell you was how our family loves Thanksgiving so much we have two a year.
The first comes in October, near Canadian Thanksgiving, not because we are Canadian but at the insistence of my sister, who snow birds it back to Florida before real turkey day and misses the family get-together. So she throws her own early Thanksgiving. It's an all-the-trimmings affair which always manages to fall on the warmest day of autumn. By dessert, everyone is sweating carbs, and someone turns on the AC.
The second Thanksgiving is on Thanksgiving Day, when we who stay up north all year get together again for a repeat performance by Tom Turkey.
And you won't catch anyone in our family out shopping on Black Friday either, because the Friday after Thanksgiving is leftovers day, our second favorite holiday of the year.
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