The Thanksgiving holiday has unfortunately become lost in, or at least absorbed by, the three-month orgy of conspicuous consumption and self-indulgence that I have come to call HallowThanksMas.*

Here's how it goes (as if you didn't know).  Soon after the end of summer at the time when children despair and parents rejoice because it's when the kids return to school, retailers launch the Halloween campaign, having exhausted the back-to-school market for notebooks, backpacks, laptops, iPods, sidearms, and such.  Halloween is no longer just trick or treat night when the kids don makeshift costumes and fill bags with fun-size candy.  (Kids must think adults daffy for calling miniature candy bars "fun size"; big candy bars are more fun than something one can swallow in one gulp.)  Now the kids dress up in store-bought outfits more suitable for adults at the Mardi Gras, and adults have lavish parties.  There's money to be made, so retailers encourage the expansion of Halloween from trick or treat night to an extravagant blowout.  The weird neighbors who decorated their yard with tombstones every October are now part of the mainstream.

No sooner is the Halloween merchandise off the shelves and in the 50%-off bucket than the Christmas merchandise appears.  In fact, it's often there even earlier, with Santa Clauses and holly garlands competing for space with witches and pumpkins.  That is as it should be.  If consumers didn't spend huge sums around the holidays, our entire economy would go belly-up.  We would be plunged into a depression so deep that Wal-Mart would file for bankruptcy.  Banks depend on us to build up enough debt on our credit cards so that we can scarcely afford to make the "minimum monthly payment" for the rest of the year, thus assuring them something like 200% interest on the money they loaned us.  It's the way our plastic society works, and without plastic few of us could afford Christmas (or even Halloween in its modern configuration).

But wait a minute.  What happened to the "Thanks" part of HallowThanksMas?  Are a few cardboard cutout turkeys all the marketers can come up with to promote the Thanksgiving holiday?  Where are the inflatable turkeys and pilgrims for our front yards?  The squirrels ate a hole in the Halloween pumpkin, so it rotted out, and it's a tad too early to put out the inflatable reindeer and snowman.  Apart from a turkey and some extra foods that are part of the grocery budget anyway, what can we buy for Thanksgiving to contribute to our national pastime – shopping and the accumulation of debt?  Where's your creativity, folks?

Thanksgiving Day has become a mere preview to the main event.  If Christmas is a feast, Thanksgiving is merely an hors d'oeuvre.  It is the first of a series of Christmas deadlines – the day by which we're supposed to have our houses decorated for Christmas.  It is Black Friday Eve, the day before the "official" launch of the holiday shopping season, and I have no doubt that some people spend a good part of it toning up their elbow muscles and practicing their body blocks for the next day's contest at the mall.  (For those who have been living on another planet, Black Friday is when all the stores open before dawn, offering ridiculously low sale prices on merchandise that is sold out five minutes after they open.)

Let's not waste time lamenting the commercializing of Christmas, the transformation of a religious and spritual holiday into an orgy of conspicuous consumption in which the principal deity is Mammon.  It is, as was noted earlier, essential to the health of capitalism that we observe it by marching to the mall like lemmings and commiting financial suicide by leaping off plastic cliffs into a sea of debt.  However, could we at least honor Thanksgiving as an oasis of sanity in the midst of this madness?

Perhaps we could restore Thanksgiving to its original place as a day for reflecting upon past blessings we have received instead of a day of looking forward to what we hope to get.  Perhaps we could set it aside, at least partially (between football games), as a time for quiet reflection.  We wouldn't have to risk our reputations as the last of the big spenders.  We could do it privately, prayerfully, quietly.  Then we could go nuts at the mall.

*While I have heard a few others use this term lately, I came up with it before I heard anyone else using it.  You'll just have to take my word for that.