Thanksgiving

This post has been in my head for weeks now, but I do want to get it down. The Sunday after Thanksgiving I heard a lady say this was one of her favorite weekends of the year. You get to celebrate Thanksgiving, then start Christmas celebrations and decorations. My first thought was really? Thanksgiving weekend one of your favorites? To me Thanksgiving has always seemed like the redhead stepchild of holidays, especially end of year holidays. The commercialized syntactic just hasn't figured out to commercialize Thanksgiving, and so it its often forgotten about, smashed between Halloween and Christmas.
But then when I contemplated this even more I realized the lack of commericalization had nothing to do with with my disbelief. Near the end of Sunday afternoon, I realized it had been a fun weekend, Thanksgiving day with a lot of family, then three more days, of nothing much, but hanging out with my husband and of course the kids. I wondered why I hadn't ever seen Thanksgiving before as fun. Then I remember the majority of my life I have been in school, and the last couple of years of that, 8 total, was spent not enjoying Thanksgiving. Sure I enjoyed it while it lasted, especially in college, until it was over, then I was filled with dread and horror, to realize that I didn't read all the textbook chapters I had missed during the semester, realizing I didn't work on my final term paper at all, realized I didn't spend anytime studying my looming finals in just a few weeks. Oh the horror, the weekend seemed so fun, as long as I could brush away the nagging voice of you should be reading/studying. Yes, now I remember why I'm confused when people say they enjoy thanksgiving. Just thinking about it makes me stressed for that looming term paper, that I haven't started. Until I remember I have no term paper.
But now that I'm out of school I could enjoy thanksgiving.

As I thought about all this longer, I remember, also being too young to take finals, thanksgiving wasn't too fun then either, you only got three days off school (five days total), just to tease you and make you really wish for the two week long Christmas break. Now as an adult the four days of Thanksgiving, is pretty much as much as we ever get from a break from my husband's work. Pretty much as much has we have taken in vacation time since he got this job a year and half ago, and more time than he was able to take off for the birth of our second born child. Yes, four days without work, seems like a really GOOD deal these days. Now I see the joy of Thanksgiving. (And wonder why you spend your whole childhood wishing you were older.)