What a lovely thread, Jamie! First off let me start by saying I think you're a wonderful person
So Thanksgiving...Hmmm. Well I've definitely never seen it as a religious holiday either. In fact I think it's specifically a secular holiday. For instance last week at church the minister was saying one of the reasons he enjoys Thanksgiving so much is because it's a holiday on which he actually doesn't have to work!
Anyway I don't exactly dislike the holidays, but they're not particularly special for me either. I have an excessively small family, and even at best there were only ever 6 of us that would gather for the holidays, and I tended to see the other 5 pretty often anyway.
Plus, I dislike holiday food, especially Thanksgiving food (Christmas food isn't great either since it's pretty similar, but Thanksgiving food is worse ). I'm a vegetarian so I don't eat turkey anyway, but even when I wasn't I didn't like it (well of course not liking very many meats to begin with is why I became a vegetarian so...). Plus, despite the fact that I tend to like most veggies and breads it's like they've purposely selected all the ones I dislike to be traditional Thanksgiving fare! Don't get me started on how gross I think stuffing, yams, cranberry sauce, and cornbread is! Even dessert, always a highlight for me , isn't very good because it's usually some kind of pie, and I'm just not that big on pie, and really even though I'm a big dessert enthusiast all I really like is chocolate and lemon flavoured desserts and those aren't very common around the holidays . So anyway, everyone else is talking about being stuffed after the holiday meal and I'm usually going home hungry!
But forget food, the think that really sucks is that despite the fact that there's only 6 of us if you get us all together in one room for several hours people are going to be pissed at each other. My grandfather and I always try to stay out of it and never get mad at anyone and are rarely the recipient of all the ill-will, my mom usually stays out of it too, but I tell ya get my grandmother, aunt, and cousin together and watch the fireworks! Of course it also sucks that for days leading up the holiday everyone was bitching about it.
Anyway, that was when I was a kid. Nowadays my aunt and cousin just refuse to visit for the holidays, and actually I can seldom make it in myself. So we're all pretty much just on our own. Which in many ways is better because then we avoid a great deal of the pre-holiday stress, a whole buncha fighting, and I don't have to go hungry! (I just eat the same things I eat any other day).
Tomorrow/in a few hours will actually be much better than usual. I'm not going "home", but my mom and I are going to meet at about the halfway mark at a casino, and visit and gamble a bit. It's what we did for Christmas last year too. It's much nicer.
So anyway, I don't really get excited about the holidays anymore and they're usually a really small deal, in fact this'll be the first Thanksgiving in about 3 or 4 years that I didn't spend alone pretending it was like any other day (except that everything is closed and none of my friends are around ).
Anyway, unfortunately I think I wrote a fairly depressing post too
Sorry Jamie, I think this really is an excellent idea and a great thread...I'm just not really the person to come to for holiday spirit
Take care everyone and I hope you all have a great holiday! (I really am looking forward to my non-traditional one tomorrow!)
-Kevin