Happy Thanksgiving! I know it was last week, but can we make this holiday last longer?

October is devoted to Halloween, which is fun. I am not hating on Halloween. But then the stores put up their Christmas stuff on November 1, and listen, I am also IN NO WAY hating on Christmas. I LOVE Christmas. I love the lights and magic and presents and how much fun it is to have kids during the Christmas season. But there it is. Christmas gets a whole SEASON.

What if all of November was Thanksgiving season? I think part of the problem is branding. Halloween colors are distinctive, and Christmas colors are beautiful and wide-ranging. Thanksgiving colors are like weird orange and brown. Sometimes you can get away with green or even maroon, or just adopt all of the colors from the “bold” set of Crayola markers – you know what I mean. I think we should let gold, bronze and other colors in the purple family be the official Thanksgiving colors so that people stop feeling gross about needing to have lots of brown all over the place. Metallics are classy. I mean, what do I know, but it sounds good to me.

I love Thanksgiving because of the traditions and family memories associated with it. Every year, my whole mom’s side of the family would come stay at our house for the long weekend, with people sleeping everywhere: in sleeping bags, on couches, a couple of cousins to a bedroom, wherever they fit. It was fun and loud, and I loved it. As I’ve gotten older, I also have come to realize how much I have to be thankful for in this little life of mine, so having a holiday dedicated to it seems right. Before all of the chaos and forced memory-making of Christmas time, what if we actually took a whole month to think about what we’re thankful for? Maybe we don’t post about it on socials so it’s not just for show, so it doesn’t become another way to compete or allow ourselves to feel bad. We can just share pictures of gold and bronze stuff when we’re feeling particularly thankful for something.

I am not at all opposed to making up holidays. Older son and I are in the process of inviting our own late-winter holiday to have something to look forward to that isn’t Valentines’ Day. I definitely don’t have anything against love or chocolate or red hearts, but it’s one of our more lame holidays, isn’t it? So we’re going to make up our own. Maybe we’re also going to invent our own Thanksgiving season that will involve non-turkey-related decor if I can get it together in time for next year. A Thanksgiving 5k will also be a requisite, so pull out your layers and hilarious turkey hats. We’re going to make this happen.