 "Photo: Chad Lewis")
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The leaves are changing from green to orange, the air is getting colder and turkeys and fake Christmas trees are replacing pumpkins and scary goblin costumes on the shelves of supermarkets. It's that time of year again: the holiday season.
It's the best season there is. I can't get enough of the jolly good times.
With all the cheery Christmas spirit, massive feasts, decorating, gift buying - and receiving - I'm usually on cloud nine for the next month and a half.
But somewhere in the midst of all the hustle and bustle of budgeting enough gift money for family and friends, deciding what decorations to buy at the store and deciding what dish I'll make for Thanksgiving dinner, I realized I, and many others, have lost the true meaning of Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Both Thanksgiving and Christmas have become consumer holidays. Everywhere you look there's something "holiday-related," which, most of the time, has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the holiday.
When I walk into a store I'm bombarded with Christmas trees, reindeer, Santa Claus decorations and snowflakes that hang from the ceiling. And now, candy wrappers have Christmas themes, holiday music plays over the store speakers and everything, depending on which aisle you go down, seems to be orange, yellow and red for Thanksgiving or red and green for Christmas.
The marketing industry has targeted us as suckers who are all for buying all this pointless crap and letting it distract us from the main point.
A lot of us have forgotten to be thankful on Thanksgiving. Lately the only thing I've been thankful for is the upcoming week off from school. While I really do appreciate the time off, it seems hardly important compared with the other amazing things in my life that I should be thankful for, such as my best friend off at college who calls me every day to make sure I'm OK, or my parents who get me out of sticky situations and my sister who makes every day easier to get through just by being there - or how about the fact that I have a roof over my head and food to eat.
I lost count of how many times I heard people complain about seeing extended family for the holidays because either their aunt doesn't make the gravy right, their cousins are annoying, they don't like their uncle's new girlfriend or because it's boring and their grandparents don't have TV.
Thanksgiving is a day to get away from our busy lives and gather with family and friends and reflect on what we're thankful for, instead of tuning each other out with the TV. Even if our families can get a little annoying or weird, imagine if they weren't there.
The point of Christmas is also so far lost in gifts and decorations that even atheists and agnostics celebrate.
Christmas is celebrated to honor the birth of Jesus Christ, making it a religious holiday, and atheists and agnostics aren't religious, so why are people celebrating something they don't believe in? The answer is because America has made it nothing more than another consumer holiday for everyone to celebrate. All of the holiday fluff gets people to buy, buy, buy, regardless of their religious beliefs.
With all the distractions, it's no wonder why we've all forgotten the reason we celebrate.
This year is going to be different for me. My family will be celebrating in other ways. It does bum me out that traditions will be broken this year, but I've realized that's not what matters. I'm going to be thankful for everything I'm blessed with and enjoy spending time with family and friends and rejoice in the birth of Jesus instead of stressing over what presents and decorations to buy.
This holiday season, remember why we celebrate these two days. We should all take a step back, put the credit cards down and redefine what the holidays mean to us. Getting into the spirit by buying holiday items is fun, but will only bring temporary happiness. Being with people we truly love and care about on these days will supply us a lifetime's worth.
Kelley Chandler can be reached at kchandler@theorion.com
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