So, here we are just about two weeks past Halloween, and a local radio station is playing Christmas music already.

Whatever happened to Thanksgiving?

You know, it used to be that people would think it inappropriate for Christmas decorations to be out before Thanksgiving. They’d frown upon stores promoting Christmas sales prior to Thanksgiving too.

Nowadays, Thanksgiving is just a day off from work, so people can prepare to hit the stories on Friday for the early Christmas sales.

I guess people are thankful for Christmas sales.

It seems like Thanksgiving is treated as just a bit of an inconvenience shoved in there between Halloween and Christmas. It makes a good excuse to pass off leftover gourds and pumpkins from Halloween as fall harvest decorations for Thanksgiving. Maybe next year they’ll just glue some pretty feathers on the leftover bat decorations and call them turkeys. Some people would never know the difference.

Or care.

Because it used to be considered inappropriate to start Christmas promotions prior to Thanksgiving, FDR even tried to move Thanksgiving earlier to give merchants a longer Christmas sales season. I guess even back then Thanksgiving was viewed (by some) as an inconvenience between Halloween and Christmas.

Then, fast forward to today, where it doesn’t matter when Thanksgiving is. We’ll just ignore it. Let’s start playing Christmas songs in November. Start Christmas sales right after Halloween. Who cares? Thanksgiving? What’s that? Oh, yeah, a day off so people can eat turkey and watch football.

Thanks for that.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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