Category: advertising

Have you walked into a store lately?  It is three days before Thanksgiving and you can scarcely find a single piece of evidence that it is nearly upon us.  By contrast, the Christmas advertisements have been in full swing since the very day after Halloween.  The stores are elaborately displaying all kinds of items for sale.  If you were relying on retailers to be your holiday calendar, you could be forgiven for forgetting Thanksgiving even existed every single year.  I am confident that this would be just fine with the highly paid marketing departments of every single retailer in this country.  Why?


The answer is simple: there is nothing to sell you at Thanksgiving.  Oh, most gatherings will have some version of the traditional feast.  There is the turkey that you pay for by the pound, that has been fed so many steroids that you would not want to square off with it in a dark alley.  It had to be conceived in a test tube because its parents were so muscular they could not mate naturally.  It is then injected with water and stuffed with dismembered, inedible parts (not even necessarily from the same turkey) to tip the scales at some completely unnatural number.  Also the casseroles, cranberry sauce, stuffing, potatoes, greens, pies, etc.  And perhaps a new table cloth.  But that works out to a paltry figure compared to the shopping frenzy that is Christmas.  Stores want the world to be one more reason to spend extra money after another.  If a major holiday does not provide that they strive to remove it from the conscious of the public in favor of a more profitable one.  And it works.  Radio stations have been following suit for many years now, and we have become accustomed to seeing commercials as early as October for Christmas paraphernalia.  By contrast, my kids' schools (which are not really even allowed to talk about Christmas any more) spend copious amounts of energy pushing the Thanksgiving myths upon them.  They have nothing to sell.  I wonder if this were somehow no longer going on in schools - if the active [mis]education of our children about the ways of Thanksgiving was happening as part of the curriculum - would this holiday slowly sink into obscurity alongside Groundhog Day and May Day?

Marketing trends control many more parts of our culture than most people are savvy to.  Don't let them dictate to you what you should spend your money on.  When I was a child, we made our Halloween costumes from odds and ends and we used a pillowcase for a sack.  I can't remember the last time I saw a creative homemade costume.  And my kids used plastic pumpkin buckets that we bought for their candy this year.  Ghosts made of clothes balled up in a sheet have been replaced by increasingly elaborate Halloween spreads on front lawns.  All can be purchased at your local big box store.  Marketers are sculpting holiday "traditions" to encourage more consumerism.  In the years to come, look for the "traditional" Thanksgiving gifts to relatives if they can't manage to get us to forget the holiday completely.  And expect "traditional" New Years' dresses and suits to become fashionable.