Hey You Get Off Of My Holiday!

1 Thessalonians 5:16-22
16 Rejoice always, 17 pray without ceasing, 18 in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.19 Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not despise prophecies. 21 Test all things; hold fast what is good. 22 Abstain from every form of evil.

When I was a child I used to hear all of these older men that I knew wax nostalgic about the "Good 'Ole Days" which I thought was an actual time perioud in American history. We had the Gay 90s(which refers to the 1890s and meant something totally different than what you might think. However we could still call the 1990s the Gay 90s for a completely different reason. SUPER!). We had the Roaring 20s, the Psychadelic 60s and so on. Yet I always wondered when the "Good 'Ole Days" were. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized, when I started to lament how things had changed since I was a kid, that the "Good 'Ole Days" were more of a remembrance of happier times than an actual period visible along some antiquated timeline.

I guess when one gets older that it is natural to look back and wonder if life in general has gotten better or worse. I have started to do this of late for many reasons, but the biggest one is that I am getting older and things are changing. We are just a few days away from my most favoritest (as I used to say back in the "G.'O.Ds.'") holiday of the year: Thanksgiving. I have always loved this holiday because it had always marked the beginning of the Holiday Season, and more importantly it was a time to gather around with family and friends and enjoy a moment of pause in thanks for what we have been blessed with. As a kid it meant a short school week followed by FOUR whole days of no school, of playing with friends, of FREEDOM!

There has been, within in the last ten years or so, a trend to move Christmas earlier and earlier. The trend has been pushing Thanksgiving to the wayside in order to get Christmas going faster. You know that you have seen it happening too. Stores that have Christmas decorations up in early November. Christmas trees have been on lots for the last couple of weeks. Don't people who buy those know that they will be dried out by Christmas Eve. I saw a Christmas commercial on TV the day after Halloween, which was November 1st! Why is this happening? It is happening because of the greed of retail stores nationwide. There is very little money to be made off of Thanksgiving, except by the supermarkets but that amount pales in comparison to the money made by the retail industry off of Christmas.

When I was a kid I don't remember seeing any signs of Christmas until after Thanksgiving and that was usually Santa bringing up the rear of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. More times than not we didn't see any Christmas vestiges until the beginning of December. We even used to get our Christmas trees on Christmas Eve. Try doing that nowadays and all you will be able to find is a tree that would make Charlie Brown's Christmas tree look like the one in Rockefeller Plaza.

And speaking of Charlie Brown, when I was a child his TV specials were on only once a year at a set time. If you missed it, you missed it and were one of the very few kids across the country who had to wait until the following year to see it again. That was in the day before cable tv, satellite dishes, dvds, Tivo and VCRs. But now all of those Christmas shoes are shown several times, just like the 24 hours of A Christmas Story shown on TNT each year. Or you can watch them on DVD or Tivo. How special is that? To me not very because one of the greatest treats about it was the next day at school when all of us kids would talk about it and recount the whole show as if those we were talking to hadn't seen, but they had.

So Thanksgiving gets pushed aside for the almighty dollar. How sad! There is little time for one to even digest their turkey dinner before people are going to bed early just to get up in the dead of night to go to some store before the farmers are even up to save a few bucks on Christmas gifts.

Christmas gets the lion's share of songs too. Other than Over the Hills and Through the Woods there are no Thanksgiving songs. Why is that? I think that is that way because we don't really, as a nation, know how to give thanks or whom to give it to. The Pilgrims gathered with their neighbors, the Native Americans, and gave thanks to God for seeing them through that first harsh winter where a number of settlers succumbed to the elements. They gave thanks to the Native Americans for teaching them how to gather the bounty of the new world in order to survive the lean, cold times. They knew how to be thankful even when they had seemingly little in which to be thankful for.

So, this Thursday enjoy Thanksgiving like you would a fine wine. Enjoy its boquet, its aroma. Sip it and enjoy its flavors. Share it with family and friends and take your time with it. Christmas will be there the following Monday, I promise. Be greedy with these four days for your family's sake. For you kid's sake. For God's sake. Enjoy! And give Thanks!