We borrowed many holidays from the Americans, we celebrate Valentine’s Day, Halloween, St.Patrick’s Day, but I think we skipped the only holiday that deserved to be somewhat “borrowed”: Thanksgiving Day.
In the beginning, Thanksgiving Day was a holiday in which God was thanked for the harvest of the year that had just ended. But over time it turned into a day in which you give thanks for everything and especially for everything. One of the most important holidays in the USA, a day of celebration in the family, everyone sits around the beautifully prepared table and gives thanks out loud for everything beautiful that has happened in their lives in the year that will end soon. Loaded with positive feelings, it is an exercise in honesty and tenderness, and that is precisely why I think I like the idea of this celebration very much. It is possible that precisely this exercise of sincerity and “confession” was not liked by the Romanians.
Thanksgiving Day is celebrated in the USA every year on the fourth Thursday of November. In 2015, it falls today on the 26th. Apart from the big chain stores, all other businesses and public institutions close both on Thanksgiving Thursday and on the following Friday (known as Black Friday), to give families the opportunity to get together, to get to eat the traditional baked turkey and pumpkin pie with everyone, and to get to the busiest shopping day of the year, Black Friday, when the purchase of Christmas gifts begins. In America, this is how the craziness of the winter holidays begins, it’s the day that kicks off.
What is beautiful about this holiday is that it does not have a marketing strategy. Apart from the turkey, it has no other symbol, the shops cannot be decorated specifically because there is no specific, and no gifts are given, in other words, its essence has been preserved: that of getting closer to your family, to your loved ones without any artifice.
There are other nations that celebrate Thanksgiving, but not on the same day as the Americans. Canadians celebrate on the second Monday of October, in England it is celebrated on some Sunday after the harvest and has nothing to do with the family reunion. In Germany, it is also celebrated at the beginning of October and somehow merges with Oktoberfest. In Australia, it is held with great pomp on the last Tuesday of November. However, the American holiday is the most popular and seems to be the most beautiful.
In Romania, there is Harvest Day, in a similar way in the sense that thanks are given for the harvest of the year that will end, but it is not so important and has nothing to do with the family. Harvest Day does not have a fixed date, every area or city in the country hosts the outdoor party on a weekend in October. Romanians celebrate it with Romanian music, mititei, must, and beer.
