Hallowthanksmas: A Discourse

Does anyone else feel like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are too close together?

Halloween: Come October 1st, or even September 1st, everyone is excited about Halloween. People talk about costumes, parties, dances, and the like that they will participate in for Halloween. Everyone wants to watch scary movies and go to haunted houses. Halloween gets the longest season for celebration of any of these three, purely because of its calendar date: there are 30 whole days of October before the holiday, not to mention all of September, whereas Thanksgiving has at most 27 and Christmas has only 24 (unless you're counting from the day after Thanksgiving, which could be as many as 31). But should it really have first priority here, people? Maybe my dislike for Halloween comes from a childhood tendency to get scared easily (this may or may not be a lingering tendency to get scared easily...). I was one of those kids who always dressed up as a princess, fairy, or angel; I always hated haunted houses, and I was usually secretly glad when Halloween fell on a Sunday and we couldn't go trick-or-treating. Now, I realize it is my dislike for the principle of fear. Call me a killjoy if you want, but fear is Satanic, and a holiday that has become associated with scaring the living daylights out of people for fun is not a good thing, if you ask me. But enough of that; my real complaint lies in the fact that the Halloween season is far longer than Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I don't think that's fair.

Thanksgiving: First of all, no one ever knows when Thanksgiving is, because it's the fourth Thursday...so you have to pull out your calendar and then count down from the first Thursday to find out when it is. I feel like Thanksgiving gets gypped, because people are still enjoying their Halloween candy and the fun of dressing up for various costume-wearing Halloween celebrations at least a week into November. Then there's the fact that Thanksgiving is downplayed anyway; everyone is excited for Halloween to come, but no one really seems to care about Thanksgiving. There are very few Thanksgiving decorations: when you're a kid you make turkeys out of construction paper, but after a few years you end up making jack-o-lanterns for Halloween, putting up trees for Christmas, and doing nothing for Thanksgiving because you're still cleaning up those rotten pumpkins and getting ready to put up all the holly and the ivy. I'm surprised that we Americans, notorious for how much we love stuffing our faces with food, should neglect this holiday that encourages a feast in which you eat as much as humanly possible. But in all seriousness, have we forgotten what it means to show gratitude? We feast for Thanksgiving to celebrate and show our gratitude for the many blessings we have received. Shouldn't this be more important?

Christmas: I could say a million things about Christmas, but I'll settle for a few. Christmas has all this wonderful music to listen to, when there is little or no music for Thanksgiving and Halloween. This is not a plug for more Halloween or Thanksgiving music. Rather, I feel like there should be more time to listen to Christmas music. Some people get mad if you do so before the official Christmas season starts, but I'm a supporter of Christmas music whenever you want to listen to it! Unfortunately, the school calendar does not support Christmas. There are always final exams, papers, and other projects that make it impossible to really celebrate the season until semester's end. By then there is no more than a week to celebrate the season. That really is not enough time. Christmas, as the holiday dedicated to the birth of Our Savior, ought to have the longest celebratory season of all, because the birth of Jesus Christ is of greatest importance. Shouldn't our priorities be with the Savior?

To be fair, we still have school on Halloween, and we get two days off for Thanksgiving and two weeks off for Christmas. But I don't think that makes up for it. I'm not proposing we overhaul the system and change the calendar so that Halloween is halfway through September, Thanksgiving at the end of October, and Christmas gets two months. I just think that our priorities are a little mixed up, and that we should place greater emphasis on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And that is my long, but worthy, justification for the fact that I am currently listening to Christmas music. =)