Thanksgiving has become the holiday caught in the middle

Pity Poor Thanksgiving – The Holiday Caught in the Middle

By James Terminiello 

Last week, I saw one of those menacing 18-foot skeletons that people plant on their lawns for Halloween, but with a twist. It was dressed as a Pilgrim. Today, I saw an inflatable turkey on another lawn being menaced by three knife wielding skeletons.  Yes, it appears that the venerable Thanksgiving holiday has now become something of a punch line.  

It has been coming for years.  

Halloween has evolved into a consumer sensation with $11 billion plus being expended annually on candy, decorations, party items, and costumes of increasingly detailed and often terrifying design. (What the Chinese who make all this stuff must think of us, I leave to your imagination.)  

Christmas, of course, is the grandmaster of consumerism with an estimated $960 billion shelled out annually in an orgy of excess. 

Poor, sad, tragic, corn-fed Thanksgiving comes in at around $5.6 billion in expenditures. A pittance. But this is not only about money.  

All three holidays have deep religious roots. Halloween combines the sacred harvest with remembrance of the dead. Christmas, it must be reminded, is about the birth of a savior. And the Thanksgiving is about, well, giving thanks. And the best person to thank is an all-powerful being mentioned frequently in holy text. 

But religion has lost favor with so many. The reasons are far too complex for a mere blog. Suffice to say that today’s culture has done it’s darndest to bleach the religious aspect out of the Yuletide as much as possible. Season’s Greetings to all and similar bland and calculatedly inoffensive expressions. 

And the secularization of Halloween and Christmas has been a resounding financial success for the purveyors of the shiny, overpriced, frequently unnecessary loot we seem compelled to acquire in order to celebrate the holiday with the prescribed gusto.  

Walk into any retail operation that hawks such products and you can watch the Halloween merchandise practically foam up and spill over you and then suddenly recede as the Christmas tidal wave washes away all in its relentless path. 

In between is lonely Thanksgiving. The Larry to the more vivid Moe and Curly. Some paper plates, a floral arrangement or two, pillows with a Pilgrim holding a blunderbuss, and some dry wood placards written in mock-Pilgrimese: SEIZETH THY DAY! or EAT – PRAY – TURKEY. And it’s all gone in a week – swished into oblivion in a whirlwind of retail practicality.  

Even worse for poor, lamented Thanksgiving, the cursed holiday is all about family.  And in these wretched times, family togetherness has taken and continues to take a beating. Distance, Trump Derangement Syndrome, the nitpicking nettles of pop psychology, expanding generational differences, and a bevy of other factors have pummeled family togetherness to a fine powder and further sidelined Thanksgiving. 

What is truly sad is that Thanksgiving is a genuine American holiday, and not some import from Europe or the Holy Land. It is, ideally, a single day for us to gather and appreciate all that we have. And as Americans we do have an abundance that even the debauched pharaohs atop their scented cushions would envy.  

One hopes that there must be some room, in between all the silly and expensive hoopla, for a little thanks.    

James Terminiello, author of the award-winning The Conscience of the C.O.D. and 2025’s Not Yet Your Time, writes from Mount Laurel, NJ.