By Madison McCann, Editor-in-Chief
Picture this: the perfect Thanksgiving. The table is set with the best dishes, and covered with a mouthwatering assortment of all the classic foods.
Now, take a step back and look at the bigger picture: the food-splattered apron hanging up in the kitchen, and the warm indent on the couch facing a TV where the muted football recap still plays. These things show a different side of the “perfect Thanksgiving.”
Though the idea that a woman’s place is in the kitchen has long since lost its popularity in many modern minds, nobody seems to bat an eye at the tradition of a wife cooking Thanksgiving dinner while her husband sits on the couch, drinking a beer and watching a football game.
This is just one of many underlying problems with Thanksgiving.
The idea behind Thanksgiving is a good one: giving thanks and sharing a nice meal with family, but there is an hidden pressure to conform to the American ideal feast.
Hours and hours are spent in the store and the kitchen to get all the food ready for this one day of the year that perfectly expresses Americans taking things to the extreme. Stuffings, pies, and of course, the infamous turkey must be had for a good Thanksgiving meal.
But is this really necessary? The hours of toil are not worth the few mouthfuls that comes of it. The Thanksgiving meal hyperbolizes American excessiveness and needless pride. Though the holiday is intended to be about reuniting with family and friends, it has been commercialized into a competition of who can cook the best turkey, and which pie crust is flakier.
The TV show The Carrie Diaries exemplifies this in an episode where Carrie struggles to keep the Thanksgiving tradition going in her family after the death of her mother, but as she struggles to get everything done, she grows more resentful of her father who lets her do all the work while he watches football. She realizes that what she thought was her mother’s favorite holiday was actually just a stress-filled day of hard work.
Then there is the day after Thanksgiving. The infamous and nightmarish Black Friday that seems to bring out the worst of human nature, and has shown people getting into fights and car accidents, or even being trampled to death by crowds racing into stores to fight over the last flat screen TV.
That doesn’t seem very thankful to me.
In fact, it seems pretty greedy. Other countries around the world see America in this light. We come off as compulsive pigs who can’t be thankful without being able to gorge ourselves afterwards, and then reward ourselves by throwing ourselves into consumerism like lemmings hurling themselves off a cliff.
And let’s also not forget that the whole tradition of Thanksgiving is based on the invasion of colonial imperialists who basically decimated an entire culture and the lives of thousands of Native Americans.
I completely believe in giving thanks and celebrating with family; however, Thanksgiving just takes it a little too far.
The holiday’s base was tragedy, and it hasn’t gotten much better. People tell themselves how lucky they are and all the things they love in life, and then they go out and show how dissatisfied they are with their lives by trying to buy enough to make themselves happy.
Happiness is very rarely found in shopping, though. It isn’t found in eating until you’re bloated and just want to sleep, or in sitting on the couch staring at a screen, or in creating the perfect meal. Those things are all circumstantial. If you can’t buy what you wanted to buy, if your team loses, or if somebody else cooks a better turkey, there goes your holiday.
But sharing a meal with people you love and feeling satisfied with your life, even if just for a moment? That can give you real happiness.
So take the pressure out of Thanksgiving. Don’t think of it as a holiday, and don’t buy into all the stereotypes surrounding it.
Just have a good time sharing a meal with people whose company you genuinely enjoy, and think of what you have, not what you want.