By Maria Parfenova

Paying Attention To Thanksgiving’s Message

Every year after the end of Halloween, stores begin to recognize the importance of Christmas by putting up holiday decorations, and most of them neglect Thanksgiving. It seems that nowadays people have lost their awareness of Thanksgiving.

This sparks a question. Is Thanksgiving underrated and replaced by the hype of Christmas?

Freshman Jack Micallef agrees that Christmas has more meaning to him, and he wasn’t taught much about the meaning behind Thanksgiving.

“I prefer Christmas rather than Thanksgiving. Christmas brings family and friends together, and it is celebrated by lots of people year round. Families eat big dinners and exchange gifts with one another too,” Micallef says.

Although Thanksgiving is a holiday where people are supposed to “give thanks”, most people are found to be more giving and joyous during the Christmas season.

Senior Elisabeth Christ says that the meaning of Thanksgiving has been washed out by stressing over food preparation.

“Everyone gets excited about thanksgiving but actually it’s a stressful day for the people who have to cook for it and the turkey is always dry, and what if you are vegetarian?” Christ says.

Thanksgiving can also be a controversial holiday, especially for the remaining descendants of the native American population. It seems that we have lost sight of what really happened on Thanksgiving day: The native americans were lied to thinking they could share a wonderful meal with English settlers because not long after “making peace” with the native people, we destroyed and took their land, murdered some of them, forced them to abandon their culture and walk the Trail of Tears, which led their population to dwindle to almost nothing.

This Thanksgiving was an especially tragic one. As families across the countries were spending time together and enjoying their meals, the native american population of Standing Rock, North Dakota was fighting against the government for clean drinking water.

Although this “holiday” is not exactly moral, we should still celebrate our freedom and entity of resources while recognizing that the native people of this country need to be given support also.