Ping!
So stay home. No one has a gun to your head.
If you work in retail, you may be required to put in some hours.
Restaurant and movie theater workers have known for decades.
Thanksgiving has its own sales and sales gimmicks, e.g. free turkeys as loss leaders to get people to buy all the trimmings at a particular store, etc.
I used to be a traditionalist with regard to Thanksgiving and tried to get my family to celebrate with homecooked food at home, but I've lost that battle and we often now go out for Thanksgiving dinner. If the essayist wants something real to worry about vis-a-vis Thanksgiving he should note that it's much easier to find an open restaurant on Thanksgiving than Christmas.
The thing is, the holidays are what you make them. You can choose to make it extremely commercial or avoid it all together.
You make a decision yourself how you will live your life.
At my house, Thanksgiving is the high point of the year. It is my favorite holiday. Christmas, with its emphasis on shopping, really is easily commercialized and has been commercialized to death.
Thanksgiving, though, is hard to commercialize. Its just a meal, your family, and a prayer. Don’t want to lose the culture war? Stand up at the head of your dinner table and give heartfelt thanks. Its important to do it, and its important for your family to see you do it.
Its easy to blame society and the culture when you yourself have given up. But it all falls back to you. You decide and you build the culture you want to live in, and build it at your house. There are plenty of people who have no place to be on Thanksgiving who will be glad to show up at your table if they know they are welcome, so always cook extra.
In the retail world the “sales associates” often work ONLY for commissions, typically 2 to at most 6 percent of retail price.
Bob Cratchitt had it better.
I never hear anyone upset for the people in Detroit and Dallas that have to work every year for the football games.
/johnny
For example, that Detroit/Chicago game that millions of people are watching right now...thousands of people had to get up for work this morning to make that possible. From the TV crews to the security guards to the stadium workers. And this is only one of three NFL games being played across the country.
Then the restaurants, that allow millions of people to not have to cook at at this Thanksgiving Day. Those people had to come to work today as well, in order to cook the food, wait the tables, wash the dishes and whatnot.
Then you got your hospitals, gas stations, convenience stores, police stations, fire stations, and on and on. For all those people, this is just another work day.
It's Thanksgiving Day and all the womenfolk are going shopping tonight and tomorrow. I'll just stay home and hang Christmas lights.
Thanksgiving has always had a major commercial aspect and been a start of the Christmas shopping season. That’s the whole point of the Macy’s Parade, it started to bring Santa and a bunch of parade fans INTO the store to start the shopping. None of this is new, and some of it is actually less common than it used to be (Thanksgiving parades used to be pretty much anywhere that had a department store willing to get a permit).
A Thanksgiving Reflection
Tenacity: A Thanksgiving Lesson
On The Grace of Gratitude – A Thanksgiving Meditation
Father Corapi: This Thanksgiving, Give Thanks For What You Have [blurry screen alert]
This Thanksgiving, Give Thanks For What You Have And For What You Have Lost!
[CATHOLIC/ORTHODOX CAUCUS] Prayer for the Church and for Civil Authorities
Giving Thanks for the Hard Things in Life
100 Reasons to be Thankful, Even in Hard Times
Let Us Give Thanks (even in these difficult times)
Thanksgiving Day