Hello everyone! I am back from a holiday hiatus caused by my decision to take my two young children, aged 3 and six months, back to their grandparents’ home for Thanksgiving this year. The experience of having to fly commercial with not one, but two young children, has been an inspiration, however, particularly after we missed our connecting flight and were required to wait five hours for a stand-by seat on the opposite side of the airport.

You may remember my earlier post how Halloween is superior to Christmas as a holiday. The reasons: Christmas is practically coercive with how pervasive it is in our culture, to the point where participation is mandatory. Halloween is less demanding on your time and respects your decision to opt out of it.

Thanksgiving tends to be every bit as coercive as Christmas without one-third the effort and you don’t even get presents. As shown by my ordeal flying half-way across the country with kids, Thanksgiving allows your parents to make you feel guilty for not attending a large meal they are cooking for you, even if you need to go through hell and back to get there. Yes, the food is good, but most people living in America, where Thanksgiving is a thing, live down the street from food which is every bit as good and you can get that food for lunch every day. Yeah, Turkey and stuffing is good. Is it any better than Vietnamese Pho or artisan pizza?

Then, there’s the proverbial argument with relatives. I never have the problem of arguing politics with my relatives, but oddly every newspaper columnist and blogger other than me does. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to get into a political argument these days because of how uniquely unpleasant they are. That’s largely because political arguments rarely revolve around what policies the government should take and more around what political team you are on and why the other team is trying to destroy America. It’s better to talk about sports, where a Yankees and Red Sox fan can sit down with a beer and rationally discuss whether the BoSox suck this year, a fact which can be verified or falsified by looking up the team’s record on their phones. We talk about sports the way we should talk about politics and vice versa.

All of this could be justified if Thanksgiving did anything to stop Christmas creep, which it does not. Malls and department stores start putting up Christmas decorations immediately after October 31 in my experience. Thanksgiving is less a buffer to Christmas and more an opening shot to start shopping. This is why another annoying Thanksgiving “tradition” are the reports of shoppers lined up outside the stores the next day, complete with stories of people being trampled and crushed to death. This is all because Thanksgiving shares the same basic themes of Christmas: gratitude, being together with family, cherished memories etc. It doesn’t have enough of its own identity to do anything but be a sign post that says “Christmas is coming.” Halloween has a different meaning and different symbolism, so it can successfully contain Christmas creep.

That’s the reason why Halloween is better than Thanksgiving: because Halloween is better than Christmas, and Thanksgiving is really just a part of the Christmas season. We celebrate Thanksgiving the way other cultures celebrate St. Nicholas Day: as a preview to the big show.