It's the Holiday Season!

The Canadian Thanksgiving is in October, on our Columbus Day. It actually makes more sense to me that Thanksgiving would be on the day that we were actually “discovered” rather than some random day that was chosen by our government.

I am Chandler Bing when it comes to Thanksgiving. I love the premise of the day: being thankful for all the good things in our lives. I think this is important. In a perfect world, one would be thankful and grateful every day. One would live their life like the Tim McGraw song “Live like You were Dying.”
But reality intrudes and it is difficult to be thankful when the person just cut you off in traffic or the store clerk is rude or the telemarketer calls during dinner.

In my case, it is forced family fun. It’s a holiday so we’re all going to be together and have fun, damn it! However, I celebrate with two Thanksgiving dinners in one day, this probably skews my attitude with an overabundance of family and food. In this case, overabundance and thankfulness not so much a good thing.

I thinking blending the holidays into one long season is a great idea. Let’s not call it Winter anymore. It’s the Holiday Season. It starts with Halloween and ends with New Year’s Day. What a fun season! Beginning with a holiday and ending with a holiday. Now we just need Halloween to be a federal holiday and we can have the day off! AND…if we call it the Holiday Season, it encompasses all Holidays: Kwanza, Hanukah, and Ramadan. etc. How much more politically correct could that be! It’s a win/win situation!

But then, people say that the holidays have become trite and commercialized. If we were to have an entire season to celebrate, would it lose its specialness? For example: I always loved Christmas lights and as a child wished we could have them always. I remember saying this to my mom one time and she gently explained that if we had Christmas lights all the time, they wouldn’t be special anymore, they would be ordinary. This made Christmas even more special in my eyes.

Now there are holiday lights for more than just Christmas. There are Halloween lights and I have even seen lights for Valentines Day. My dad has lights for Independance Day.

Now when I travel into Canada, it is a little odd, as an American, to see Christmas lights up in October. I am used to hearing people grumble that the Christmas decorations are in the stores on Halloween so to see people embracing an early Christmas celebration is a little bit of a mind shift. But I like it!

I’ve also noticed in Canada, they have all different colored Christmas lights; where we tend to have the icicle lights or multicolored strings. Purple seems to be very popular there. I haven’t noticed purple lights “down” here so I’m curious if there is significance.

As I was chatting with a Canadian hostess last night, I found it interesting that the Canadians…at least the BC ones…begin celebrating Christmas as early as the day after Halloween. We agreed about how fun it is to have two months to prepare and celebrate the Christmas holiday. She was nearly done with her shopping and preparations so she had all of December to just relax and enjoy. That sounds perfect to me! I think we should do it too!

Let’s embrace the example our Northern friends have given us. Winter is so dreary, let’s pep it up a bit! Bring on the Holiday Season!