5 Best Reasons to Hate Thanksgiving
When I was young, I admit that Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday. My entire family got together for a visit. We also ate amazing food cooked by my father or my grandfather, depending on which house we were at. But since they both left this earth when I was a teen, creating a grand canyon sized family split, Thanksgiving has become more of a dismal event than a welcome one. If you’ve never really thought about all the sensible reasons to hate Thanksgiving, keep reading. Let me enlighten you a little about the dark side of Turkey Day!
Why Thanksgiving sucks
It’s really appropriate to analyze the worst things about Thanksgiving, since old monuments are being torn down across the nation. This is a great holiday to dump on because it deserves to be dumped. If you’ve ever experienced any of the things below, you will probably have no problem agreeing with me we’d be better off without the day before Black Friday.
1. Speaking of dumping, Thanksgiving is officially the most popular time for couples to break up. This is true for college kids through age 27, researchers say. Whether it’s your mother’s dry turkey breasts or simply a good jumping off point before the Christmas season, pre-Thanksgiving breakups are in. Hello, heartache!
2. This is one holiday where you can forget about catching up on your sleep deprivation problem. Thanksgiving means helping to chop, mix, bake, stir, sweep, wash, shop, and/or drive relatives from the airport and around town. Virtually no woman, at least, can escape the work required to make the feast happen.
3. The conversation at the table can go all sorts of ways. Even if you escape being the target of an unwelcome inquisition, you’re likely to have to choke down your cranberry sauce between catty comments and hardcore putdowns directed as someone you at least remotely care about. A nice defense can be to store up some potentially interesting small talk to throw out when things get really awkward.
4. No day of the year is worse for travel than the day before Thanksgiving. If you need to fly, drive, or ride a bus or train, you can look forward to congested travel. What’s worse than the security line at the airport?
5. Whether you love or hate the games on television on Thanksgiving, there’s a reason to hate it. True sports fans have to put up with all kinds of unwelcome chatter and interruption all day long. Those who despise sports can count on the television being fully occupied.
So Thanksgiving is a few days away, and I’m dreading it. My only solace at the moment is that the questionable history of colonial treatment of North American native Indians could end up being the death knell for the holiday, based on trending acts of political correctness. Life is crap but one can hope.
3 COMMENTS
I agree. My wife decided on September that she wanted to separate and get a divorce. We have a 6 year old so I’ve had to find a place to live and start paying child support on top of that. Thanksgiving and Christmas mean nothing to me now in addition already hating my life. I intend to sleep through both of these shitty days. And this weekend i’m over visiting to spend time with my kid and she has Christmas movies on. Thanksgiving and Christmas may be happy days for most people but to me it’s just two more days to hate my life even more.
In an effort to alleviate loneliness for my elderly parents, I decided to spend Thanksgiving with them. I flew 1,800 miles to see them, leaving behind my daughter and son-in-law and their kids My son-in-law’s parents, their parents, cousins, aunts uncles… You name it the entire clan converged at one relatives house…while I sat at table with my extremely crabby, grouchy aging parents and a very meager meal. I of course made the best of it, bearing in mind the fact that they would have been all alone on Thanksgiving that I’m not showing up. So from that angle I felt like I was doing the loving thing, and that feels good. Usually. That of course, on WhatsApp, what should appear but over 100 photographs of the family gatherings that I was not a part of… I can’t describe the feeling, I don’t even know what the feeling is… I feel caught in between two radically different worlds…We didn’t even take one picture… It was just a very empty quiet day… For me anyway.