After a great Halloween, I’m finally ready to celebrate Thanksgiving. Such a wonderful holiday, where we all sit down for a day with family, eat a filling dinner, appreciate the fall colors…

Wait a minute, where did Thanksgiving go?

What happened?! Did you notice that as little as one day after Halloween that stores were already selling Christmas merchandise, blaring Christmas music, and plastering Christmas decorations on every wall? Why happened to Thanksgiving? Why do we seem to go straight from Halloween to Christmas these days?

True, not everyone celebrates Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas, but even in 2015, millions of people in America and around the world still do celebrate these holidays. So shouldn’t they celebrate them properly?

Doesn’t it make sense to celebrate a holiday during the month in which it takes place, not two months prior? When October starts, we can put up Halloween decorations, and after the holiday, we can take them down, wait until after Thanksgiving, and then put up Christmas decorations and start Christmas shopping.

But that’s not the way retailers seem to want us to celebrate the holidays. They want the holidays to last longer for one reason: so they can make more money. The longer Christmas decorations are in stores, the more likely they are to sell another dozen of those giant snowflakes no one likes. They can jack up the prices for Christmas presents, such as toys and clothes, around Christmas time so people want to buy them in October and November. And the earlier people buy presents, the longer Christmas seems to last. And with a longer Christmas comes more — you guessed it — money for the corporations.

But even if corporations use Christmas as an excuse to fill their wallets, shouldn’t we still be able to celebrate the other holidays? So why does it seem like we skip Thanksgiving these days?

Many people still celebrate Thanksgiving by sitting down and having a meal with family, but why does it feel like just a warm-up for the “real” holidays? Is Thanksgiving now just a meal to fill people up before they go and shop all day on Black Friday?

Few people these days remember that Thanksgiving commemorates the truce between the 17th Century Native Americans and Pilgrims (even if, historically, that event didn’t exactly happen the way we assume it did). Instead, too many of us just see it as another federal holiday that gives us a few days off school and allows us to pig out as much as we want without being criticized. So, in that sense, many people think of Thanksgiving as just a big dinner. Not something important, not something historical, not even a reason to give thanks for what we have — just to eat dinner.

In fact, why not rename Thanksgiving to what it is for so many: Pig Out Day? I can just picture the signs: “Happy Pig Out Day!” complete with cute little pink piggies rolling around on a food-loaded table and wearing little pilgrim hats. Am I exaggerating? Not much, I’m afraid.

Here’s my bottom line:  We have to remind people that Thanksgiving is a real holiday, and something to celebrate with the same happiness with which we enjoy Christmas or Halloween. It isn’t a pre-cursor to Christmas or a dinner before Black Friday, it’s a holiday we should all be able to sit down and enjoy. And as soon as we realize that for ourselves, the sooner we can stop corporations from skipping Thanksgiving and focusing on money.

So, what should we do?

Stop shopping on Thanksgiving. Sleep in a bit. Relax. Make a list of things to be thankful for. Yes, cook a big meal, but focus more on spending time with the family and enjoying life.

Then, when our bellies are full and we’re all happy, we can finally break out the old calendar and start hoping for snow.