So, now that Thanksgiving is over (and we can all be thankful for that), it’s time to move on to Christmas. It was probably somewhere around September, when the stores began to push their Halloween goods, that we started to notice some traces of wares on the shelf that told us Thanksgiving and Christmas were just around the corner. Of course, the closer the holiday, the more prevalent the trappings of said holiday become. It’s a hectic time, moving immediately from one holiday to the next. Could it be that the true nature of the modern-day Thanksgiving feast is to allow us to “shop ’til we drop” without the need to stop for nourishment on the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year. You’re well-fed and the tryptophan in the turkey ensures you’re well-rested for Black Friday, a day that economists will claim gets its name because retailers expect to become profitable. But, I think the annual Christmas trampling story shows us that Black Friday is really called Black Friday because that’s the day people lose their souls.
Then, according to one shopper, a Wal-Mart employee officially declared the holiday buying season open with these words: “On your mark. Get set. Kill each other.”
Ah, the true meaning of Christmas revealed.
Who needs it? I say streamline everything as much as possible to avoid the rush and crush of the season.
I’ve always had this idea for a nativity that did just that by pulling double-duty as a Thanksgiving and Christmas decoration. It’s pretty much like your typical nativity scene, but instead of a swaddled baby Jesus in a manger, you have a turkey. Jospeh is standing there, a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, his tongue licking up the side of his mouth like Wile E. Coyote. The Three Wise Men are gathered around with gifts of cranberry sauce, dressing, and giblet gravy.
Later, after Thanksgiving, you can replace certain items to make it more Christmasy. (I’m still trying to figure out how to design it so that all the pieces snap together to form a NASCAR race car. Also, it might come with singing fish.)
Pure genius, I tells ya.
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Perfect! I think Dale Earnhardt Jr. could play the baby Jesus come Christmas time. The wisemen could be commentators, and the shepherds could be race car fans.
Your interchangeable nativity is a fantastic idea. But I think it would make quite the statement if you just left the Joseph-carving-turkey-in-manger up throughout the first few weeks of December. Kind of play up the way we as a society have turned Thanksgiving into Christmas, part 1, and how no holiday is safe from the consumeristic tendencies of our market-driven society.
Yeah, you could so so many things with it. One idea was to have it transform into a giant robot that performs circumcisions.
You could probably leave it up in the Thanksgiving mode until the end of December and nobody would notice. If anybody complained, just say that it isn’t a nativity; it’s a diorama depicting the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.