Every year around this time, holiday music begins to flood popular radio stations, and festive decorations start being sold at every department store. But should this be the case? Many people believe that Christmas music and Thanksgiving should be kept separate. After all, Thanksgiving is the last holiday of Fall, and nearly a month later is Christmas. Although many people celebrate other holidays, such as Yule, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and Three Kings Day, much of the “holiday season” is undeniably oriented towards Christmas.
However, I believe that the holiday season should include Thanksgiving, and thus Christmas music should play before and around Thanksgiving. The reasons for this are clear, on a closer examination. First, we should start with the season. While technically, Thanksgiving and Christmas happen in different seasons, it isn’t by much. Thanksgiving happens during the fall, that much is clear, and specifically on the fourth Thursday of November. Christmas day is December 25th every year. Interestingly, the first day of winter this year is December 21st, only four days before Christmas. Realistically, this is incredibly close to fall, so we can’t really account for seasonal differences for why the two should be separated.
More importantly, are many of the ideals and themes that the two seasons share. Again, let us start with Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a time for reuniting with family and friends, and being thankful for all the good things in our life, along with eating a copious amount of food. Christmas is also a time for spending time with loved ones, and a time for giving gifts and goodwill to people – along with participating in mass consumerism. As we can see, from a positive side, both holidays are about family, friends, thankfulness, cheer, and goodwill.
Even on a negative side, the two holidays match up rather well. Thanksgiving is most well known by Americans to be a holiday for gorging oneself on a copious amount of food. The over enjoyment of food is often called gluttony. Additionally, the mass consumerism of Christmas plays into people’s desire for things and material goods, manipulating the greed of people to fill the pockets of wealthy executives. In Catholic tradition (the same traditions Christmas comes from) greed and gluttony are two of the seven deadly sins. In even older Judeo-Christian traditions, greed and gluttony were treated incredibly similarly, only focusing on different objects (money and food, respectively).
In short, the thanksgiving and Christmas seasons are incredibly similar, sharing many of the ideals and traditions, and not being separated by time as much as most people thing. Therefore, I propose we combine the two seasons, and label them the Pre-Winter Festivities, incorporating Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and many other December holidays. Thus, it would be appropriate to play Christmas music around thanksgiving.
