'Tis (Almost) the Season-- The Holiday Season that is!
It’s that time of year again. The weather is cooling down, midterms are causing mental breakdowns left and right, the flu is ravaging the student population, and Pumpkin Spice Lattes are an option once more. That can really only mean one thing. It’s the holiday season.
We just had Halloween. The candy. The spider webs. The excuse to consume copious amounts of alcohol. Really, though, Halloween is great. Who doesn’t like Halloween? It’s a chance to embrace your inner child. Once you reach a certain age, you feel obligated to no longer do things that are considered childish and not socially acceptable. Wearing costumes and eating candy for dinner are some of those things.
It’s more than just that, though. Not only is it embracing our inner child, we also fully embrace a superstitious culture that was seemingly long abandoned in this age of technology, logic, and reason. We no longer believe in witches or werewolves or any number of things that once was a focal point of our fears and caused terror amongst people who lived near the woods or graveyards.
Halloween is pumpkins slowly going soft on the front step. It’s little girls dressed up as doctors and boys dressed up as firefighters. Halloween is sorting the candy out with your siblings and trading swapping out the candies that you don’t like with one another. It’s walking down the street with a group of your friends, talking and laughing and bonding with the strangers around you in a way that’s hard to recreate any other day of the year.
During Halloween, however, we can shed our logic and let an older mentality take us over. We can suspend reality and live, for a night, in a world that we both wish we lived in and are glad that we don’t. This is the time that our inner storytellers come alive. This is the time where we all wish to believe in something bigger than ourselves, even if it’s the darker parts of our folklore and myths.
And after Halloween, we seem to roll directly into Christmas. If Halloween is when we embrace the darkest hopes of our childhoods, then Christmas is when we embrace all things good and wholesome and bright. This is not the time when we go to a stranger and ask them for things, but when a stranger comes to us and brings us the things that we’ve secretly been wanting for some time now.
Christmas is happy music that everyone knows the words to floating through the air. It’s red and green tinsel wrapped around all of our light posts. It’s nutcrackers standing guard outside the toy stores in the mall. Christmas time is when you see family that you haven’t seen in a while, and share stories over eggnog. It’s when you hang ornaments on your Christmas tree with your family and recount the stories of where you were when you got them or who you got them from or where you were when you got them. Christmas time is lighting a fire in the fireplace, even if it’s far too warm outside to light a fire. It’s when the air smells like pine trees and it’s never too hot outside for hot chocolate.
What a lot of people forget, however, is that there’s a small holiday in between Halloween and Christmas called ‘Thanksgiving.’
Thanksgiving, I think, is often left by the wayside, because it doesn’t involve candy or presents. Thanksgiving just involves the presence of family that you maybe haven’t seen in a while. Instead of decorating the house with fake spider webs or neon lights, you cook and set the table and you talk to the people around you. There’s no end goal, other than to have a meal. There’s no night out wander the streets or a final destination of a circle around a tree. There’s just a group of people sitting around a table, sharing a meal with people that they may not have seen in a while.
Often times, Thanksgiving is ignored. People go straight from ‘Monster Mash’ and ‘Thriller’ to ‘Noel’ and ‘Jingle Bells.’ Orange and purple string lights are traded right away for red and green ones. We switch seamlessly from one to the other, as if there’s nothing in between. In some other countries, this may be true. In some other countries, they barely even celebrate Halloween. But in the United States, there is a holiday in between. And it may not benefit people as much at the ones that bracket it, but it lacks the expectations of the others, as well. Maybe that’s actually part of the reason that people ignore it. But, for me, the lack of expectation is the best part. There are no presents to buy or complex costumes to prepare. There’s nothing to fall short of. You show up and you eat, and maybe you even enjoy the company of the people around you.
So, while you’re taking down your Frankensteins and replacing them with Santas, just remember; Thanksgiving is a holiday, too.