The moon is full, candy is placed into bags and “trick or treat” is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. For some this night is the best night of the year, for others it’s another holiday to get through before the real fun of what comes after Halloween starts, but what REALLY comes after Halloween?
Christmas or Thanksgiving? Does Thanksgiving really matter? At this time of year everyone is saying “it’s November, why do people already have their Christmas Trees up?” This question is something I have heard my parents and grandparents say every year since I can remember, but I believe it comes down to the real question, “Has Thanksgiving lost its spark?”
“Thanksgiving is nothing special,” said freshman Tracy Lowery while freshman Gabby Flemming says “ Thanksgiving is just as important.” Others pointed out that there is an inherent cultural difference between Christmas and Thanksgiving. “Christmas is more culturally impactful,” and “ Christmas is global and Thanksgiving is national,” said junior Emma Riffey and Ms. Andrea Turner.
People pay more attention to Christmas because more people celebrate it. People all over the world celebrate Christmas for many different reasons, whether it be for religious purposes or simply that they grew up in a culture obsessed with Christmas. There is only 1 place, America, where Thanksgiving is celebrated while Christmas is celebrated somewhere in every continent. Christmas also has many different reasons for its celebration while Thanksgiving only has one. This one reason is the independence of America and the wonderful meal that the pilgrims ate with the Native people, only that isn’t really what happened at all.
The independence of America only caused the death of Native people. The truth is that the “first Thanksgiving” story is actually the only time in most of history that the colonizers and the Native people had any sort of harmony. Throughout all of the other times when the native people and settlers interacted, they were usually in battle and ready to kill one another. The reason people have started to have a problem with Thanksgiving itself is because people have recently become more informed of the mass genocide of native people by the colonizers. This treatment of the native people still reign into our current society. According to CNN,”Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group.”
This disappearance in the enthusiasm surrounding Thanksgiving has been getting more and more prevalent through the years. Some would say that it’s because our society “doesn’t care about tradition,” or “people don’t value family anymore,” but whatever it may be it is obvious that people have started to lean more towards focusing purely on Christmas.
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