Having a Christian religion holiday become a secular mercantile holiday impinge on a national holiday devoted to giving thanks for what we have deserves our scorn. As a Christian holiday Christmas is about celebrating the coming promise. It's about looking forward to what can and perhaps should be. It's about hope. As a secular mercantile holiday Christmas is about feeling good by spending money on things to give to other people.
Thanksgiving on the other hand is about looking back and taking stock. It's about understanding where we are and where we have been. While this is certainly not opposed to the Christian holiday of looking forward to and celebrating the coming promise, etc., the two are separate activities and each deserve to considered with our full attention.
As far as Thanksgiving's interaction with the secular mercantile holiday, I prefer the idea of contemplating all I should be thankful for instead of hurrying myself in to the process of worrying about obtaining 47 different gifts for people of various ages and interests, thinking about how much money to give to the bell ringer with the red pot, should I tip the garbage man, should I tip the mail person, figuring out which lights on the strings have failed and replacing them before putting them on the fake tree which the cats are going to knock over anyway, how to possibly take the rest of the vacation time I have to take before the end of the year while still getting projects done that need to be done by the end of the year, rehearsing for all the stuff at church, not to speak about already having to deal with the fallout from the fact that this year Christmas is on a Sunday and guess who's usher team is on duty that day.
We spend so much time trying to wring the joy out of Christmas in honor of a robust economy that we end up shorting the joy of Thanksgiving down to a single day or two. Why do we do this to ourselves?
And now the secular mercantile holiday has crept up on and over the quasi-religious holiday become a day for children to beg for candy. (Perhaps a better description would be extort for candy. Trick or treat is after all a kind of threat.) One wonders how long until it creeps past Labor Day. But then, just like Halloween, one also wonders how many people ever think about what the Labor Day holiday is about beyond having the last cookout of the year and shutting down the summer cabin.
The Christmas season is a make or break thing for many retailers. They at best break even across the rest of the year. In their competition for your dollar they stretch this important holiday out. They start the sales even sooner. The result is that they begin to rob other holidays of their time and their meaning. But only if you let them.
I don't do my Christmas shopping in October, but if I happened to see the perfect present for Uncle Jake, I'd grab it. But then again, if it were that perfect, I might not wait until December to give it to him.
Give each time it's due, but don't let the calendar rule your life.
Take the time to be thankful and to hope, and don't let the powers that be tell you when to do each.
