Thanksgiving
3.17.8
As I was saying: I love Thanksgiving.
To be fair, I never enjoyed it much as a kid. It was more of a hassle than anything, and my taste buds hadn't quite learned to appreciate most Thanksgiving foods, yet. It's grown to be my favorite holiday as I've aged, though. These days, it just seems like one of the few holidays that have remained somewhat pure.
Sure, the methods of celebration have changed slightly, and some of the stories we tell children about the "first Thanksgiving" are a bit exaggerated...but for the most part, it has escaped some of the rampant commercialization that other holidays have fallen prey to. There is a football game, and a parade, but people still recognize its true purpose. Thanksgiving is supposed to be about sitting down with friends and/or family, eating, and giving thanks. That's easy enough, and it's pretty much what we all do. Sure, the turkey companies turn a profit, but that's due to tradition, not coercive advertising.
Independence Day is another one that hasn't strayed much. Barbeque, beer and explosions...were the founding fathers here today, they'd surely celebrate in the same manner. What better way to honor our nation's birth? Of course, whiny little bitches are always trying to ruin this, too. There are more laws against fireworks every year it seems, because God forbid if some moron were to blow his own arm off, right?
All the rest are pretty much useless outside of the occasional day off from work.
Valentine's Day is a pointless mix-mash of pagan festivals and lies, which is now designed only to sell cards and flowers. Halloween is just a springboard for the candy companies' Q4 sales. I don't even know what Labor Day is all about. New Year's Eve is...well, I guess that was always about drinking. Ok, it can stay.
The worst holidays are the solemn religious ones that the corporations have taken over. Easter is now about bunnies, eggs, chocolate, and Peeps (although, I do like getting the Peeps and Peeps-related memorabilia my mom sends me each year). And don't even get me started on fucking Christmas.
Nevermind...I'm already there. Fuck Christmas. Fuck Christmas a lot (or at least the version of it we celebrate these days). Christmas barely even had a religious purpose in the first place, as nobody was ever told to celebrate the birth of Jesus (just the death and resurrection). Despite that, society found a way to destroy that tiny little amount of meaning it originally held. Christmas is now nothing more than a month long orgy of irritation. For the entire month of December each year, I can't even purchase a CD on my lunch hour because the lines will make me late returning to work. Could this possibly be what any God would want for his birthday? Mass commercialization?
Today was St. Patrick's Day. This too, was originally a calm celebration of some religious figure. That wasn't good enough, though. Instead of feasting for a regular old saint, we decided that the saint had to have magic snake-banishing powers, and that he must have taught religion using shamrocks. Of course! Shamrocks! Because he's Irish, right?
And fuck the feasting. The only thing that Irish people know how to do is be green and drink, so let's do that instead. And so the modern version of St. Patrick's Day was born, and it became the drinking holiday. It's so intertwined with drinking, in fact, that the pope refuses to even acknowledge that this day could take place in the same week as Easter, instead declaring that the 15th should be St. Patrick's Day this year.
All in all, it seems that holidays are simply meant to be bastardized as time goes on. I can only hope and pray that when Summer Day becomes an official holiday in the year Two-Thousand-Soon, people will keep their capitalistic little hands off of it...
