Halloweekend has come and gone and with it another round of ingenious costumes and unforgettable moments. I stuck with the tutu theme I started last year with my friend Meghan (we were loofahs) and a group of four of us dressed up as Teletubbies. Last year, the night before Halloween was the best time I had had to date and once again, October 30th proved to be the best night of the year so far. Halloween is like the Holy Triduum for college kids – three days of devotion to something bigger than yourself (in this case, the shenanigans that are Halloweekend). Now that it’s passed, many of us are turning our attention to the next big thing: CHRISTMAS.
But hold up, wait a minute. Aren’t we forgetting a pretty important holiday?
Thanksgiving is like the neglected middle child. We get so hyped up about listening to Christmas music and admiring the first snow that we forget about what’s important. Christmas itself has become such a commercialized celebration worldwide that most people forget what it’s really about: not the gifts or the amazing food or even being together with extended family. It’s really about Jesus. That’s not to say that family time, good food and gift giving are bad, it’s just that we get too caught up in the wrong elements.
At this point in the semester we’ve made it halfway through, but the worst is yet to come. Finals are just over a month away and professors are cramming in as much material as possible before reading days. Stress levels will be running high and that’s a recipe for disaster.
An article I wrote several weeks ago focused on how to keep life in perspective when things aren’t going as smoothly as you would like. The sentiment that goes hand in hand with this is gratitude. It is an incredibly worthwhile skill to develop to be able to step back from a situation, analyze it objectively and tell yourself “I’m pretty lucky to be where I am”. There are countless people in the world who don’t know where their next meal is coming from or how they’ll be able to send their kids to school yet we obsess over one test score or a busy week.
Thanksgiving is the perfect solution to the conundrum of finding time to be grateful. Though it is slightly less commercial than Halloween and Christmas, it can still be easy to think about the days off from school we get because of it or eating a HUGE meal with all of our loved ones.
Again, though, is this really the point? November should be a month in which we take time to really reflect on the blessings that we have in our lives, especially as students at Notre Dame. We’ve been given incredible opportunities to grow and learn in an environment that prepares us for a successful future. We all know the story of the first Thanksgiving as one of celebration of the successful settling of the colonists and the help that the Native Americans gave them. It came from a place of gratitude, and it’s an attitude we should emulate in the coming months.
I know just as well as the next person how easy it can be to take things for granted. If something suddenly falls through or is taken away it can be devastating, and you wish you had been grateful for it while you had it. The campus community should challenge itself to take moments each day just to thank God, their parents, professors and friends for all of the love and support they receive from them. Learning to live like this could have a tangible and widespread impact on Notre Dame as a whole and could enable us to be a good example for other college campuses across the nation.
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Images: 1, 2-5 provided by author