Thanksgiving Sell Out

So much for Thanksgiving being the lone holiday that’s not bastardized by consumerism. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. I love the focus on food and family and friends. It’s the one time of year we embrace cooking real food and sharing it with the people we love. There’s a casual elegance to the holiday; I drape my wrinkled French Provencal cloth napkins alongside my china and Waterford. Let’s be honest, life’s too short not to pull out the china and crystal for a grilled cheese sandwich and glass of OJ. Why do people take up valuable storage space for stuff they use twice a year? The clink of crystal makes me happy so we use our nice glassware all the time. I say go for it.

Thanksgiving at my house is about food, copious amounts of it. And wine. Ditto on the copious quantity. There’s also some parade watching, which will be downright close to being there on our obnoxiously large television. Of course football gets center stage, both playing and watching. Bird practically uses his football as a teddy bear so he’s all about a holiday that involves some pigskin. He prefers pork to turkey so he would be pretty damn enthralled to find a suckling pig taking center stage on the table instead of a bird.

Thanksgiving is the no-pressure holiday comprised of the Triumvirate of Fs -food, family, and friends. No presents. No candy. No secret mythical characters to sprinkle magic, deliver candy, hunt eggs, or leave money under the pillow or chocolates in shoes. No gifts. No white elephants. Nothing hung by the chimney with care. No lights to untangle or pine needles to sweep up. Nothing to wrap. Nothing to stash. Nothing to do but cook (which isn’t a chore for me because I find kitchen therapy to be quite helpful), eat, share, laugh, toast, hug, revel, and enjoy. Well, there is clean up, but since I cook I pawn that chore off on someone else.

Apparently consumerist culture doesn’t agree with my assessment of Thanksgiving. Now stores open shortly after the tryptophan kicks in. We can barely digest our second helping of bourbon pecan pie before we need to don our walking shoes and line up like lemmings for the latest and greatest door buster sale. The one holiday that is supposed to be about spending time together is now more about spending money. I find it distasteful and tacky that stores open on Thanksgiving evening for Americans to shrug off family and shirk tradition. We all need time to just surround ourselves with the people who fill our hearts and make our jaws ache from grinning. We should spend the day among laughter and guffawing, not Cabbage Patch frenzy and extreme couponing. I hate that retail has usurped yet another holiday.

I’m holding on to Thanksgiving. You won’t find me scratching my way through the aisles of <<insert big box store name here.>> I’m going to put on my fuzzy slipper socks and sneak a third piece of pie. We won’t be tackling our gift list, but there might be some other sort of tackling going on.