After the closure of Halloween on October 31st, everyone switches into Christmas mode.
After moving costumes, faux spiders, and family-size bags of candy to clearance, stores cover their shelves with ceramic Christmas trees and string lights. TV channels begin non-stop streaming of Elf, and Christmas carols and tunes fill up every radio station.
People seem to always look over the holiday that falls between Halloween and Christmas: Thanksgiving.
It's not that people do not celebrate Thanksgiving, in fact, according to Pew Research Center (PRC), 91% of Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. On the other hand, PRC estimates 90% of Americans celebrate Chritsmas and the National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates that only around 73% of Americans celebrate Halloween.
If Thanksgiving has more popularity than Christmas and Halloween, how come Americans only show little to no spirit for it?
First, let's begin with decorations. Besides the occasional cornucopia or turkey wearing a pilgrim hat poster, there are none. So few people decorate strictly for Thanksgiving that there is not even a survey that estimates the percentage of Americans who do. For Halloween on the other hand, the NRF suggests that 51% of Halloween celebrators decorated their homes or yards in 2025. For Christmas, as you can imagine, the NRF claims 91% of celebrators show spirit by decorating, and 34% of those people do so before Thanksgiving, meaning over a month before Christmas occurs.
For Thanksgiving being so highly-celebrated, it does not have nearly the amount of decoration options or decorators as the other holidays. It also lacks spirit in the amount of media, meaning movies or songs, that are about Thanksgiving.
I assure you that if you were asked to come up with five Halloween movies, you could do so in a heartbeat. Maybe scary movies, like Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, or Halloween, come to mind. Or perhaps you think of more lighthearted movies like Hubie Halloween, Casper, Hocus Pocus, or Goosebumps.
If you were asked to do the same for Christmas, you could probably think of millions. Elf, A Christmas Carol, Home Alone, The Santa Clause, the list could go on.
But if you try to come up with one Thanksgiving movie, it's nearly impossible; in fact, there are hardly any that exist. A classic like A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is one of the few. Some may argue films like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles or Instant Family are Thanksgiving movies just because of the time of year the stories take place, even though they do not have lots of Thanksgiving themes.
Songs also carry a similar story, that being that there are none for Thanksgiving.
From the morning of November 1st all the way until December 25th, radio stations play Christmas carols non-stop. According to Spotify, there are upwards of 194,000 different songs. If you simply walk around a store, odds are you will hear someone humming one of these tunes or the store speakers blasting them.
Granted, there are very few Halloween songs, but there are definitely more than for Thanksgiving, as expected. Halloween still has “Spooky, Scary Skeletons” and the Ghostbusters’ theme song, but Thanksgiving once again has nothing.
Americans are not against celebrating Thanksgiving and indulging in all the delicious foods that come with it; in fact, according to Business Insider, the amount of food consumed on the last Thursday in November is astronomical.
Here are the facts:
46 million turkeys are eaten each Thanksgiving
Americans consume 2500-4500 calories at the Thanksgiving table
5,062,500 gallons of canned cranberries are consumed
19 million pies are purchased for Thanksgiving
So what is it? Why do Americans indulge so heavily in Thanksgiving but fail to show spirit for it as they do for Halloween and Christmas?
We need more Thanksgiving movies and songs to enjoy while we celebrate the holiday with family and friends.
We need more decorations that can keep the Christmas trees and wreaths in the attic until it's their holiday’s turn. After Halloween, it's Thanksgiving.
As Americans, it's our job to show more appreciation for the holiday that has been so important for bringing people together, sharing thankfulness, and creating memories for so long.