The Death of Thanksgiving
Here’s a completely speculative question that arose in my mind as a result of absolute bias, personal experience, and self-insecurity. That question was, “Will future generations celebrate Thanksgiving or not?” I mean, it’s impossible to remove a nationally celebrated holiday from society. However, with technological advancements, the rise of anti-socialization, and the passing of much older and traditional generations, Thanksgiving may see its doomsday. Perhaps this centuries-old holiday is coming to an end, or perhaps it is here to stay. So, here are my reasons for believing Thanksgiving will die out in the future, as well as my reasons for believing it will not.
The Rise Of Anti-Socialization Amongst The Young
No More Family?
Isn’t Thanksgiving all about getting together with friends and family? It appears that the youth are becoming estranged from their relatives, either because they come from toxic homes or because they no longer want to associate with them. I’ve seen and heard people celebrate Thanksgiving and other holidays with their friends rather than their families, and it’s becoming increasingly common to forgo biological families in favor of a new family formed through strong friendships. But, even if you aren’t exactly isolating yourself from your immediate family, how often do the young reach out to their relatives? What is the issue here? Because without family, Thanksgiving may no longer be considered as a holiday for the young to celebrate. If there’s no family involved, there’s no need to dress up, sit at the kids table, or avoid your aunt’s bad cooking, right? It also appears that, in addition to not celebrating with relatives their own age, younger generations have lost interest in starting their own families. This custom may just perish with us
Anti-Socialization Amongst Ourselves
So, if we’re not talking to our relatives, to whom are we speaking to? Anyone? Do we want to speak with anyone? I’ve heard so many of my peers complain about how they dislike interacting with others; am I taking these comments too seriously, or is it true? Have we completely lost our sense of community and regard for others? Do we no longer want to interact with one another because we perceive people to be too difficult to handle and interact with? Can we have conversations with coworkers, colleagues, classmates, or complete strangers? If not, can we even spend hours together in the same room feasting on a grand meal? I have a feeling that things will become awkward and that social interaction will be impossible to maintain during such an event. Especially if this wave of anti-socialization continues, which I believe is being driven by one major factor…
Social Media & Texting
I hate to bring this up because it is said all the time, but social media may be killing how we interact with others. When I look around at my peers, I notice that we are all so immersed in the lives of others through a digital screen that we are unable to immerse ourselves in their lives in person. I then compare how my friends and I communicate via text to how we communicate face-to-face. It’s so different, and I can’t imagine myself holding a conversation for more than a few minutes, whereas there appear to be so many ways to express yourself in text. However, Thanksgiving does provide us with a new experience to share on social media. We like to show others our food, our families, and how luxurious our vacation is, but what else is going on behind those minutes of video and snapshots? Perhaps a fun, festive celebration, or an awkward, dramatic disaster.
Is it also possible that Thanksgiving will become a digitally celebrated holiday? We had Zoom Thanksgiving or didn’t celebrate it at all during the Covid-19 quarantine. This trend is undoubtedly continuing, and it may become more advanced as new technologies such as Meta emerge. Perhaps our contact with reality will become increasingly distant, and we will fall victim to delusion.
Traditions Are Dying
The Death of Recipes
I think about this a lot because I have parents who either don’t cook at all or don’t cook very often. So, I was never taught to cook, and now they’re trying to get me to learn, but I’ve become disinterested and more fascinated with fast food, which has fed me since I was a child. So I envy those who have parents and family members who can cook and have passed those skills down to them. They learned those recipes and can make them from memory or a recipe book.
Thanksgiving is all about showing gratitude over a lavish meal. Obviously, one of the most important components is food. What are young people supposed to do if they don’t know how to cook? Should they look up recipes online or buy ready-made food? We see the tradition of homemade recipes fade from generation to generation because they are not passed down through practice or are passed down orally and then forgotten. How many of your relatives who cook their own meals have recipe books? Or do their children already know how to cook said food? My point is that unless recipes are written down or heavily practiced, they will disappear and we will lose a sense of valuable tradition.
I’m African-American, and I love eating soul food for Thanksgiving. I don’t want to be in my 30s looking up soul-food recipes online from someone who isn’t of my culture, or having that food taste completely different from what I was raised with. So it’s my responsibility to try to gather recipes from relatives who can cook. But how many people in my situation will try to do the same? Do they even have the same level of access to their relatives as I do? That brings me to my next point.
Our Relatives Are Lost
I keep bringing up family and communicating with relatives because that is the most important part of Thanksgiving in my opinion. My mother knows everyone on her side of the family. Everyone knows who she is, and she knows who everyone else is, so everyone knows about me as well, because I am her only child. But I don’t know anyone, and having grown up socially awkward and inept, I’m not sure how I’d feel trying to socialize with these members of my family. But I see them every Thanksgiving, and we always have a great time. I treasure these moments and memories because I know they will be lost in the future because, unlike my mother, I will be unable to organize these events.
So, our family’s elders are those who know almost everyone in the family, how to contact anyone, addresses, and literally anything else to stay in touch with them and bring the entire family together to celebrate. If they do not pass on that knowledge to the next generation and socialization is not prioritized, family sizes for Thanksgiving dinners will continue to decline. Nobody will be able to tell what the other is doing. Some will be missed, while others will be completely forgotten. We may have nearly hundreds of family members not of our knowledge, but how are we supposed to bring them all together if this information was never shared with us in the first laace? Now our family is lost.
Who Takes The Responsibility
Okay, this point may make more sense, or it may not. I’m tired of talking about Thanksgiving as if it were some sort of massive family reunion where everyone has to show up. Even with smaller families, who is taking on the responsibility of hosting these events? As I previously stated, my mother usually organizes our family parties, so it is expected that I will host them in the future, but it will not be me. Will it then be my eldest cousins? What happens when they get older? Is it their kids? You most likely have a very young social butterfly in your family, and you may assume that they will be the one hosting these events. That could very well be the case. So, who is actually interested in going? Our attitudes toward this holiday may change with age, either positively or negatively, and if it is negative, we may disregard the invitation sent to us because its significance is no longer valuable. Will you host your family’s Thanksgiving celebrations, or will you delegate that responsibility to someone else?
Why Celebrate Tragedy?
The History That We Celebrate
Unlike the others, this will be very short and straightforward because I don’t believe it requires much explanation and I don’t believe it is truly that important to the general public. However, Thanksgiving is a holiday with a tragic history. On this day, many Native Americans were massacred, and as pilgrims discovered indigenous peoples’ land, they brought diseases with them, leading to the genocide of many Natives. Then came Thanksgiving.
The world is changing as more voices are being heard through heavy demonstrative activism. In a world where we no longer tolerate insensitivity and bigotry, why are we still celebrating Thanksgiving on a national scale? For example, we were successful in replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day as a holiday. I’m not saying we should replace Thanksgiving altogether, but why celebrate it at all?
Though I believe that many people do not know the true history of Thanksgiving, and I am not fully educated on it myself, I believe that even if we do know it, do we really care not to celebrate it? It does provide us with an opportunity to gather with our friends and families, enjoy a holiday, and eat a lot of food. However, if the erasure of America’s racial history continues for the sake of progression, shouldn’t Thanksgiving be included in this erasure? Are we celebrating because we are ignorant or unaffiliated?
Conclusion And Opposing Points
Opposing Perspectives
In some of these paragraphs, I’ve listed some counter-arguments to my points. I don’t want to go into detail about my opposing viewpoints because I believe Thanksgiving will continue to be celebrated as a national holiday for centuries to come simply because it is. Leaving aside all family traditions and politics, we as people require this holiday simply for a break. Many students have fall break for this holiday, and many workers take time off to celebrate. Such things are required for both leisure and capitalization. Every Thanksgiving Thursday, Black Friday follows. A grand scheme devised by many companies to get people to shop for the upcoming holiday, Christmas. Thanksgiving, like any other holiday, serves as a mascot for American nationalism.
Throughout, I have primarily addressed the urban demographic. I have not included the perspectives for rural demographics, who are known to be more family-oriented and neighborly, and who are unlikely to suffer from things like community value loss or trance in social media. Those who live in small towns with friendly neighbors are more likely to interact and celebrate Thanksgiving than those who live in an apartment in a large city full of people who live constantly to serve themselves. So, while I am speculating that Thanksgiving will vanish in the future, I actually don’t believe it will. If one holiday disappears, does that mean that the rest should suffer a similar fate? I’m not a Christian, and neither is the majority of the American population, but I still enjoy celebrating Christmas. Is it insensitive to also celebrate it on a national scale?
Conclusion
Okay, I’ll admit that this entire thing was just a bunch of what if’s and spiraling thoughts, but I hoped I sparked something in your mind, whether you agreed or disagreed. If you have any thoughts or ideas to share with me, such as your arguments against the article as a whole, I’d love to hear them, and I’ve included my email address below. This whole thing was really just self-selection based on my own weaknesses and lack of certain traits that are seen as more favorable for events like these.
I do not believe that everyone is like this, and I do not intend to include the vast majority of “youth” in this category. I really only have an optical image, and I have high hopes that our generation and future generations will recognize these fading traditions and fight to restore them. Or making their own, unique traditions. However, I had a lot of fun writing this opinion piece, and I hope you enjoyed reading it. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you had a wonderful holiday!
: ashleesalter13@gmail.com