Okay, sorry to start the post with such a downer statement.
Anyway, Thanksgiving is sort of like "opening day" for the holiday "festive season" that lasts about five weeks. To use another sports metaphor, Thanksgiving is like the "exhibition game" that prepares us for the "regular season" of Christmas (and Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year's Eve/Day).
Thanksgiving is also the "Rodney Dangerfield" of holidays: no respect. And in recent years, Thanksgiving is taking much more of a beating for being racist and an anachronism. It's hard to dispute this, certainly when it comes to Thanksgiving origins. Even if one ignores Thanksgiving's roots in European extermination of the native people of North America and tries to treat it as a day in which we "give thanks," let's be real: who really takes time to "give thanks" for anything on Thanksgiving? If you do, then that's wonderful--more power to to you. But for the vast majority of Americans, Thanksgiving is simply about stuffing turkeys, stuffing our faces with turkey and other food, avoiding and/or arguing with family, and watching professional football on television. So, maybe Thanksgiving really doesn't deserve respect.
While I cast a jaundiced eye at the holiday season, I admit that I actually like about half of it. I do like the festiveness (even if it's performative) and the decorations. However, I enjoy looking at other peoples' decorations. I'm not a Christmas decorator. I am definitely not a Clark Griswold. My idea of Christmas decoration is haphazardly throwing up some lights on the front yard shrubs on December 18. You will never catch me outside on a ladder meticulously decorating the entire house the day after Halloween. (And, yes, there are plenty of people in our suburban neighborhood who do that).
I know this isn't a unique opinion, but I'm also not interested in the shopping/gift-giving feeding frenzy that takes place during the holidays. I don't mind the act of "gift giving," but will we ever not be obsessed with "the more, the better"? This is a losing battle.
I will now forever return to how I saw the lowkey manner in which Christmas is celebrated in Germany--or at least as I witnessed in my little corner of Dresden/Radebeul last year. Christmas was a family lunch at a restaurant in Moritzburg followed by a long walk on the grounds of the castle and then a mid-afternoon snack of coffee and sweets. Gifts were limited to one or two nice things per person. I loved it. Does it represent the way everyone in Germany celebrates Christmas? Not necessarily, I suppose. But by-and-large I have to assume that Christmas in Germany--and the rest of the world--is much sparer than here in the States.
This is all I have for now.
