In a comment on yesterday’s post, Dixie said her local store is advertising,
Spend $75 dollars before Thanksgiving and get 50% off of your Thanksgiving turkey.
I think that’s refreshing. Our store used to put Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November) items in its candy/decoration aisle right after Halloween. This year they went straight to Christmas. We’re also getting Christmas catalogs already, as well as seeing Christmas ads on TV. Except for Dixie’s comment, I have yet to see a mention of Thanksgiving. Have you noticed something similar where you are?
If you don’t celebrate Christmas where you are, are some holidays more commercial than others?
All our festivals, including the imported ones are commercial now. What used to define an agrarian community’s annual spending during slack periods between seasons has now become an excuse to use the festivals to indulge in that modern obsession of shopping. Urban India today spends millions on Valentine’s Day for instance!
I’m not surprised by the commercialization. I figured even if most of you don’t celebrate Christmas, the merchants would find other holidays to promote!
Years ago when we were paying 19 cents a pound for turkey at Thanksgiving, Lydia & her American friends paid $3 or so a pound for a small turkey. That’s because Sweden didn’t grow turkeys.
That wasn’t about commercialism but I had to throw that GEE WHIZ fact in.
I can understand why they would be willing to spend that much on a traditional turkey. I think it’s great that it was even available. Does Lydia still celebrate Thanksgiving?
Gee, I don’t know. I gave Kendra a t-shirt with an almost life sized turkey on the front. Then a turkey was considered a person inept or undesirable, a failure.
(computer definition)
As I recall, Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey, not the eagle, to be the American bird.
This year, for the first time since 1888, Thanksgiving and Hannukkah fall on the same day. Of course Thanksgiving only goes one day… even though there are enough football games to go the eight days that Hannukkah celebrates. (bikehikebabe: there’s a gee wiz.) I have plans to post about that shortly… “Thanksgivukkah” is the buzz holiday title! I do hope I spelled that correctly. I site the reference for the name in my post(smile).
Thanksgiving in some communities is considered a burden. In my local grocery store a young woman, with three children, said she really needed the money, more for Christmas. That day requires lots of celebratory foods, snacks, and treats for the stockings. And no the store doesn’t appear to be pushing the day either. A large “tree” of canned pumpkin greets me when I enter! Oh – let me stop now.
I think some people think Christmas is a burden too, especially those with small children and not much money. Also people without families who feel especially lonely/depressed because of all the hoopla. I think Americans as a whole go crazy about Christmas. One reason I did my shopping early — everything shipped by Thanksgiving weekend at the latest — was so I could avoid the frenzy. Our Christmases have always been low key.
Christmas is horrendously commercial here.
Easter seems to have escaped somewhat. Although in the last few years Easter Cards have emerged.
Christmas is the worst for us, too. Easter is more about candy, and for us so is Valentine’s Day. Andy enjoys going down the candy aisle when one holiday is over and they immediately put out the candy for the next holiday. It’s a fun ritual even though I’m not a candy eater. And it’s usually more successful than going down the cookie aisle looking for Kebler French Vanilla Cremes.
We don’t seem to really have anything about Thanksgiving
Everything is starting to be Christmas here, the mall carpark have up their decorations and I guess in a few weeks Santas’ dell will be WIP. Junk mail catalogues are all about Christmas – I just spend an hour this morning rifling through it all – in case regular letter was entangled with it all. My letterbox on the street isn’t very big…(actually it’s not a box at all, but inserted into a bricked fence ‘post’)
Fairly soon, the Post Shop will tell us that we should get our cards/parcels mailed to overseas destinations if we want it to arrive in time 🙂 everything nowadays goes by air.
I bumped in my Christmas day friend the other day, we normally talk on the blower and he said “it’s nearly time for your wish list” – oh bummer!
The main presents we send now are to Kaitlin, Torben and the puppies. That’s a lot easier than when we had a lot of extended family to send to. I got in the habit of shopping early. It must be a lot worse if you have to send overseas.
I sympathize with your having to look through all the catalogs to make sure you don’t accidentally miss an important letter.
We’ve always sent our children & their kids $$$. They buy what they want. How practical can one be?
Cathy, “The world is the same over”. In Sweden when they had garbage carts at the street, we soon had those. When the teens in Sweden were wearing all black (Goth–Blonds look like death in black), American teens were doing the same. Commercialism has swept the world too. It wasn’t like that 60 years ago when we weren’t so connected. Computers & the world-wide web did that.