Thanksgiving is a Holiday about showing gratitude to your family, your home, and anything in between. Gathering with family and friends to give thanks over a delicious feast is a joyous and wonderful occasion. But is it overshadowed by Christmas and all of the holiday hype?

Gavin Ahearn, a junior at East, agrees that Thanksgiving is an amazing holiday that often gets glossed over.

“Thanksgiving is definitely underrated. People have even been celebrating Christmas before Halloween, even though you have two great holidays coming up,” Ahearn said.

A big reason Christmas gets all the hype is the gifts and holiday marketing. This, combined with travel that people do for Christmas, has led to spending being exponentially more for Christmas than for Thanksgiving.

According to Fox Business, surveys showed that Thanksgiving hosts expected to spend $431 on average in 2024, while for Christmas, they were projected to spend $1,638 on gifts, travel, and entertainment, according to Demandsage.

Taliyah Nason, another junior at East, feels that Thanksgiving gets looked over more and more as time passes.

“Not a lot of people really celebrate Thanksgiving all that much anymore. The majority of people just brush it off and don’t really give it much attention since it’s just really about food and giving thanks to what they’re grateful for,” Nason said.

Thanksgiving is a holiday that offers the chance to celebrate family and appreciate the successes of the year.

Thanksgiving is much more than just quiet celebrations and materialistic things.

But Garrett Mueller, a sophomore at East, has his own view of the holiday that’s generalized and different from the previous students.

“Honestly, I think it’s pretty fairly rated. I feel like at the end of the day, it’s just food and it’s seen as that”. Mueller said.

Thanksgiving is a holiday meant to allow people to have a break from the chaos of everyday life and appreciate the friends and family gathered with them. East students get to enjoy a week off from school for the holiday to rest and recharge for the end of first semester.

Written by junior Nicholas Reingold and senior Ethan Lin. Edited by staff writers for Oswego East’s online news magazine The Howl.