Thanksgiving is upheld in America as a day of togetherness, to look aside from the chaos of life and be humbled to know that friends and family will always be by your side. After eating a quaint Thanksgiving dinner with all of my relatives, I naively joined them for their traditional “Black Friday shopping trip” with absolutely no idea that I was entering the lion’s den of consumerism. I had amateur written all over my face from my expression of shock at how many people were lurking, I mean shopping, about the night, to not keeping up with everyone (silly me, I never knew you could shop to the best of your abilities at a full paced run!!). Black Friday allows us to increase our culturally “opposing tendencies that make American culture extraordinarily complex, perplexing, and contradictory” (Maasik and Solomon 477). I mean, what kind of American Holiday would Thanksgiving be if we didn’t rid ourselves of superficial thoughts, only to wrap up the night with such an escalated level of consumerism that we can’t even practice it during the day? American tradition of Thanksgiving values family, love, holidays that celebrate these values, and of course, huge sales that enable us to shop till we drop! American’s have become so consumed in their “whoever dies with the most toys wins” (Shames 86) mentalities, that the meaning of Thanksgiving has morphed into a Holiday of contradiction: a celebration of what “really” matters.. as long as those importance’s do not override an opportunity to increase our material things. So, jump for joy, jump for sales, and make sure to jump out of the way to dodge the real meaning of Thanksgiving, or else, satiation might not feel good.. or at least, AS good.
Maasik, Sonia & Solomon, Jack. “American Paradox:
Culture and Contradiction in the U.S.A.” Signs of Life in the U.S.A. (2009):
477-486. Print.
Shames, Laurence. The More Factor. Signs of Life in the USA. Ed. Maasik, Sonia and Soloman, Jack. 6th ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 86-92. Print.
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