Although most holidays are intended to be religiously celebrated, when most Americans think of them, their minds immediately shift to the foods that they are associated with.
    Who can argue against that? When you think of Thanksgiving, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind…is it how the Pilgrims of Thanksgiving were taught how to grow corn from Indian tribes? Okay, maybe that’s true for history buffs, but the most common response would be “turkey and mashed potatoes.”
    Frank Haywood, a culinary arts professor at Oxnard College, agrees that food is an important aspect of the holidays.
“Anytime you have a gathering of people or social events you will find food,” Haywood said. “With our busy life styles families seem to have less time with each other. It’s only at the holidays families make the efforts to gather and share with each other.”
    It seems as if the common trend for holidays is food, and its not just one holiday, it’s all holidays. We start off our new year with the resolution to loose weight and then Valentine’s Day comes around and we can’t resist those succulent truffles that we receive from our significant others, or even ourselves, if we are that desperate. Then, the Easter Bunny brings his brunch and chocolate eggs to the table, and soon after, the Fourth of July treats you to burgers hot off the grill. Then it’s time to take the young ones trick-or-treating, and of course we steal some of their candy. Thanksgiving rolls by and it’s time to pull those jeans from out of your closet that were a couple sizes too big for you before, but now seem to fit perfectly.
    Then, Santa brings a ham and we are tempted to steal at least two of the cookies we set aside for him, while some of us are munching on latkas and chocolate
coins. And a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and we raise our glasses to a brand new year at parties filled with cake and champagne, and the whole process starts over again.
But this obsession with food throwing away the main message of the holidays? People can argue yes, it forces us to focus on the commercialism, but not the religious messages that holidays are supposed to come with. True, maybe we do spend more time than we should preparing the holiday feasts or figuring out what to buy our mothers, our boyfriends or our dogs.
    The best thing about holidays is the way it brings all of us together. When mom is making the turkey she delegates the team as if it were a sport—he mashes the potatoes, you make the stuffing, and dad helps carve the turkey.
    When we look in the stores for what to buy our friends and families, we think a long time about what they would personally enjoy.
    Okay, so maybe for some of us, celebrating every holiday religiously
and making them historicallyaccurate isn’t at the top of our list. Holidays are what you make them to be, and we don’t have to look to what “that person” says we should do to judge how we spend our holiday.