Eat Your Food, Tina
How Napoleon Dynamite Saved Thanksgiving
My children have been asking me for 24 days when we can put up the Christmas tree, watch Home Alone, and do some baking. Their requests are met with the same response every time - “Don’t we have another holiday coming up?”
The Hoffman family will not contribute to the death of Thanksgiving.
I love Halloween. I anxiously await the first day of fall to pull out pumpkins, spicy scents, and a creepy haunted house collection. There are more black and orange Halloween bins in our basement than red and green. But in between those orange and black and red and green bins, there’s a smaller purple bin. On November 1, it is opened to reveal Thanksgiving decorations - children’s artwork, mini turkeys, reusable name tags for the big dinner on Thanksgiving Day, and a DVD of Napoleon Dynamite.
Several years ago, we serendipitously started our own family Thanksgiving tradition with an annual viewing of Napoleon Dynamite. Our choice of movie wasn’t intentional. It probably began with my dad looking for a way to entertain the kids while the adults socialized after dinner but it’s become expected and in retrospect, a quirky cult-classic with a friendship theme is the perfect Thanksgiving movie.
We could just as easily turn on Home Alone on November 1 or after Thanksgiving Dinner but we’ve made a different choice. We choose to keep Thanksgiving alive in our own special way.
Tomorrow we will put Napoleon back in the purple bin on our basement shelf in between Halloween and Christmas. We will get out our Christmas trees and pajamas and Michigan Elf on the Shelf. But we’ll never erase the space between Halloween and Christmas even if it means hearing this for the next several days:
Thanksgiving, like Napoleon Dynamite, is an under appreciated, overly simplistic holiday that is in danger of disappearing if we aren’t intentional. Make the 22-28 days in November count. Make them special. Make them quirky. Resist the urge to replace your pumpkins with Christmas trees. I’m not sure what that looks like for your family. If anything, just Eat Your Food, Tina.