Holidays can have new meanings

In the wake of political correctness and cultural awareness, Pillsbury is receiving backlash on social media for diminishing the tradition behind Thanksgiving through a Friendsgiving commercial.

Friendsgiving, a lot like Thanksgiving, gives us an opportunity to celebrate our chosen family — our friends.

Pillsbury advocated this idea in a television commercial where the speaker gave examples on different ways to host a Friendsgiving celebration. The speaker concluded by saying, “The only rule to follow on Friendsgiving is make it your own.”

Although Friendsgiving is not an official holiday, it does hold a lot of value that Thanksgiving traditions do not encompass.

Friendsgiving is important to those who do not get to go home for the holidays. Thanksgiving weekend gives us just five short days off school, and that may not be enough for all of us to justify travel expenses or long-distance trips to visit our family.

In addition, the most important part of Friendsgiving is right there in the title — friends. Our friends are our chosen family, and every friendship we have is something special that makes our lives better.

Everyone should be allowed to celebrate their loved ones in whatever form they want because not everyone agrees with the history behind Thanksgiving.

We associate Thanksgiving as happy Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to a big feast. In actuality, the holiday was proclaimed to celebrate the safe return of a band of heavily armed hunters, all colonial volunteers. They returned from their journey to what is now Mystic, Connecticut, where they had massacred 700 Pequot Indians.

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving, Friendsgiving, both or neither, everyone should be given the right to express their gratitude and holiday love in whatever form they choose.

There is more than one narrative in this country, and it is great that it is being represented in the media, even as simply as a Pillsbury commercial.

Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Campus Times Editorial Board.

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