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How Not To Stress Over Thanksgiving

 

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With Thanksgiving at the horizon for the week to come, the time is right to start stressing about how your encounter with the reunited family will go on. It’s not late to get in shape, get yourself a girlfriend/boyfriend, and devise an elaborate plan to lie about the perfect life you are living. Or maybe not!

You see, we live in a society that is currently over-obsessing with perfection and idealism. What we see on the TV and on the Internet, we also want to transplant in our everyday lives. We value superficiality, the easy gain, and most of all the idea that we need to make others jealous in order to feel happy and satisfied by our own life. In this light, Thanksgiving is just another scenario for show-off and for comparisons to be made.

Let’s face it, Thanksgiving is in most situations an excellent for families separated by long distances to get reunited and share happy moment together. Traditions act as social glue in the face of a changing times and the possibility to respect traditions often triggers a sense of self-worth and pride. But in some families and especially in recent years, Thanksgiving has become a social a barometer for analyzing wealth, happiness, and success.

The critical eye of society gets a closer look at you, as there is no way of escaping questions being addressed by your own family members. But not all of us can come up positive when rounding up the sum of their existence, not to mention just the year that has passed since the last Thanksgiving. In these circumstances, attending the family dinner becomes a real burden, as you stress to keep all your demons and problems inside you.

Denying an invitation for the annual Thanksgiving might seem as a rude gesture, and might get you further away from your family members you haven’t seen in a while. But avoidance is always proffered if you are sure the reunion will not be without some serious verbal altercations. Working on Thanksgiving is by no means something to be ashamed of and this is probably your best chance of escaping an unwanted encounter. Another plan B would be to make us of the free day and plan a day round escape to a place you always wanted to go. You can even use Thanksgiving as an early Valentine’s Day if you are sick of following traditions and waiting for them to make your annual schedule.

Avoiding Thanksgiving reunion is about avoiding questions about you. How much do you earn? When will you get married? Are you still alone? You still don’t have a real job? How about finishing those studies? Although questions like these can address a real concern towards your well-being, they won’t be able to help you any way and chances are you will feel miserable in giving the same excuses. But when distant relatives or even some friends, ask these types of questions, the only purpose is to compare themselves to you and maybe humiliate you. This is your biggest fear and has brought a considerable amount of stress for the weeks and days preceding Thanksgiving. No one can force you to attend these public trials and you can use any other day to visit your parents or other close family members you really care about.

By skipping Thanksgiving, you also skip all the shopping frenzy that is taking the entire nation by storm. Forget about stupid traditions and build your very own system of beliefs and things worthy of labeling them with added value. As holydays were invented as means of distracting masses from their real problems, why not use Thanksgiving to get yourself one step closer to your life-long dream. You don’t need to eat or drink yourself to death in order to feel better about yourself and there are other ways to make the day special. Don’t be afraid to get past the norms, past the collective beliefs built on nothing more that the passing of years. So the next time you feel afraid to attend something and become the subject of gossip and scolding, don’t attend that meeting. You are not living that perfect life advertised everywhere and you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself.

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