The Irony of Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you all had a splendid time with family and friends this weekend.

I think Thanksgiving is a great holiday. As my grandma eloquently said in our prayer before eating yesterday, "It is sad that we must be reminded to be thankful" but nonetheless, the reminder is good. There is something to be said about setting aside a special day to give thanks for the abundance we've been blessed with. It's a good thing.

Too bad Thanksgiving has nothing to do with being thankful anymore. Like every holiday, it has been corrupted by commercials and consumerism. Not having the best turkey, the prettiest tablecloth, or the latest harvest-y door decoration is enough to set most people back into the realm of self-pity and dis-contentedness--subconsciously or otherwise.

It's also amusing that America dedicates the last Thursday of November to giving thanks for everything, and the last Friday of November to buying so much retail that it finally puts stores into "the black". Thanksgiving Day, immediately followed by Buy Everything You've Wanted All Year But Couldn't Afford/ Justify Day. It almost seems like many people use Thanksgiving as that justification for indulging the next morning. We spent the entire day yesterday being thankful, today we can go back to being discontent.

Thanksgiving starts and ends in the kitchen. We wake up, put in the turkey, start baking pies and chopping up veggies, peeling potatoes and cutting bread. Then we eat. Then we wash dishes for three hours. It's actually a kind of frustrating and stressful experience, leaving everyone secretly grumpy and upset, but also secretly guilty for not being really thankful for the running water and soap that is allowing you to wash dishes.

Then you get those people that text you and say,

Dear Everyone I've Ever Known,

I just thought I'd take a split second from my day to tell you that you mean so much to me that I'd take a split second out of my day to tell you that I'm thankful for you, that's how thankful I am for you. I am just so thankful for every single second we've ever spent together. In fact, I'm just ridiculously thankful for everything that has ever happened to me. I'm thankful for every color of the rainbow, and every smell in the world, I'm even thankful for spiders, rats and snakes, I'm thankful for my cell walls and cytoplasm. I'm thankful for subatomic particles and also intangible things like love, peace, happiness, and thankfulness, too! I'm just so freaking thankful. How are you today?

Love, 

T. Hank Fuller. 


These people are astonishing for two reasons: their inability to recognize a run-on sentence and their amazing and admirable ability to be thankful in every circumstance. I truly wish I could be more thankful. I don't, however, wish to show that in the form of such a text message. Mostly just because it would suck to receive that message on a bad day. How would you even respond to that?

Dear T. Hank Fuller,

I'm glad that you felt the need to list all the things you're thankful for right down to the smallest things you could possibly think of. I'm actually having a really horrible day. 

Love,

Thanksgiving Scrooge 

Not to say that thinking about what you're thankful for on a bad day isn't good. It's quite helpful to me, at least. But I am particularly bother by society (American, that is-- I can't speak for other societies) demanding that everyone always has a good day. It has become taboo to respond to an inquiry of emotional state with anything beside "Good. How are you?". This is even further extended on a day fully devoted to giving thanks.

But like I said earlier, I think Thanksgiving really is a good thing. We should have it more than once a year in my opinion. We just need to guard against these inconsistencies and problems.