Unless no one in your family can cook, the food's pretty darn good. In fact, my family doesn't really do a feast on Christmas- we save it for Thanksgiving and we just roast a ham on December 25th. I'm refusing to even acknowledge Christmas until the end of the month.
money. no gifts given, no costume to buy. so not enough money to be made by retailers. hence no hype. i believe family gathering around on christmas should be a time for thanks. no separate holiday needed.
Yep. Actually, every Christmas Eve, my mom and grandma make lasagna for dinner. Don't know why, but it's always pretty good!
Well since thanksgiving is in mid October here the bigger problem is them putting Christmas stuff up before remembrance day. A lot of companies around my city anyway didnt until afterwards in purpose because they think it's wrong to do so before. We can all be love the capitalist utopia of Christmas after that day...
You know, there just doesn't seem to be a lot to get excited about for Thanksgiving. It seems like a day that you can really only have fun with on one day. Christmas? You can celebrate that for much longer! You put out some pumpkins and turkey decorations for Thanksgiving and then what? Sing Thanksgiving songs? Go Thanksgiving shopping (not Black Friday...)? It just seems like there's no reason to let a holiday like Thanksgiving get in the way of celebrating Christmas. Now... if you're talking Halloween and before, then there's gonna be a problem. Thank you for this statement!
I think a huge part of it is that they don't have the time. Our Thanksgiving is celebrated in October and even though it's a statutory holiday, not everyone can close down their business. I think that if everyone could, more people would have the time to celebrate it with family and/or friends.. but there are people who have to work and some companies just can't afford it.
I've noticed that Christmas in the Anglosphere is often a lot shorter than it is in Continental Europe. For example, the last extended family Christmas (with both Catholic and Protestant traditions) I had in Switzerland lasted for almost a month and even though most in my family are weakly religious or not religious, it felt serious, communal and heartfelt. Thanksgiving seems like a way to stretch that atmosphere of familial closeness out that I just don't see in Australia nearly as often. However, I think it's perfectly fine for people to say why they abstain from celebrating the holiday when they're specifically asked. It's an honest explanation. But I would make a distinction between Thanksgiving and Columbus Day, which have both been mentioned together in this thread. Thanksgiving is a recognition of an agricultural past and a tradition carried on from much harder times. Its history stretches to before the commonly cited massacres and the current form of the holiday was solidified in date and customs quite a while later. Columbus Day specifically lauds a man who helped orchestrate the overture of a terrible period of colonisation and proselytism.
As far as stores are concerned, it's probably all about the money to be made off of Christmas. Christmas is hugely profitable. I seem to recall that the date of Thanksgiving can even make a difference--in past years, I heard a late Thanksgiving (with late Black Friday) can be less profitable by far than an early Thanksgiving. (It puzzles me why it would make a huge difference. Surely people's shopping list remains pretty much the same people and the same basic decoration needs year to year. I suppose it's all about impulse buys.)
I don't think anyone forgets Thanksgiving. Most stores carry thanksgiving decorations along side Christmas decorations, but not many people feel the need to set up decorative turkeys and pilgrims everywhere. Thanksgiving is also the busiest day for travel in the US. Personally I don't mind thanksgiving but it's just another holiday. I don't like turkey, I don't like football, I don't really like my relatives that come over and start stupid arguments...
I don't really know what Thanksgiving is. So that's my excuse. I know you say what you're thankful for and have a meal that's a cross between Halloween pumpkin pie and a Christmas Dinner, but that's about it.