Monday, November 17, 2008
While waiting outside of my English 1102 class my classmate and I started talking about the holidays. She who has just emigrated from Jamaica said she did not understand Thanksgiving all too well. I satirically said that Thanksgiving was a simple holiday tradition in the United States. It is simply a day where Americans overeat with people that we do not like all too much. Of course this is not the true meaning of Thanksgiving, but this is the event that most of us experience every end of November. Me personally I like Thanksgiving for the fact that it justifies me being a pig. A lot of Americans pig out 365 days a year; and 366 in a leap year. We are an over consuming race of people we Americans. Our holidays just allow us not to feel guilty about eating a whole box of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, “because it’s Christmas. It is what Jesus would have wanted! People in Africa are starving; we should be thankful for him that we can put a ham sandwich between two glazed doughnuts and eat it.”
Another of my classmates made a comment and he said, “The holidays are a time when families remind themselves about how much they hate each other.” And that is ironic. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Independence Day are all holidays that are big on togetherness. We get together to celebrate the harvest that all have benefited from and all helped to produce. We celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, whose religion speaks of man loving each other and caring for one another. We celebrate the Fourth of July when Americans stood together side by side to stand up against the dictatorship of King George III. And on these symbolic days is when most people would rather pluck each one of their pubic hairs out than to be in the presence of “those people.” I have some people in my family that I would never mind seeing again, just like a lot of other people. However most people feel that they need to keep tradition going, so they stick it out through the holidays; that is if they haven’t slapped the shit out of their stealing nephew by the end of it.
There was a time for me when the benefit of food outweighed the costs of getting my stuff stolen by one of my cousins. But that was when I was a fat kid. I am on this whole health tip now and don’t eat as much as I used to. Thus holidays do not mean too much to me as of now. That is why I am not going home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. That way I don’t have to deal with my relatives asking to borrow money from me.
No comments:
Post a Comment