With it being well into November the holiday season is almost here. Coming around the corner is Thanksgiving. It’s a holiday that is highly promoted throughout the United States and in most schools within the country. When I think about the history of Thanksgiving and what it represents about our country’s past, I wonder if Thanksgiving should be promoted at Park. I don’t think it should be, especially when seeing that our school population is very diverse and most kids don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. 

Park is known to have a very diverse population of students, coming from many different backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities. Despite this, we still promote Thanksgiving heavily when a good amount of kids are not even celebrating the holiday. When it comes to other culture’s holidays, they don’t get as much promotion or acknowledgement. When they try and promote it at our schools, they use these holidays to show how diverse the schools are and to make the administration and principal look good. This display is only for a very short period of time, and then the main holiday that will always overshadow these other holidays like a variety of jewish holidays or muslim holidays dont get days off but thanksgiving does.

This is just another example of the lack of inclusivity at Park when it comes to representing our identity as students and how we express our cultures. It becomes biased because one holiday is more important in the eyes of the administration. It makes me angry. If Park is giving this much hype and promotion when it comes to holidays like Thanksgiving, they should be expressing that with other holidays that are celebrated by students as well. 

Besides the lack of inclusivity portrayed when “non-mainstream” holidays get less attention than Thanksgiving, we never include the history of Thanksgiving either. It represents a history that isn’t good and has a horrible past. With one group of people taking over another group in the process, the truth is that we don’t talk about that and we still promote this holiday to a large extent. The morals and beliefs that Thanksgiving emphasizes are great — getting together with family and embracing unity in general is a good thing. Despite this, the way it’s been represented in history is not good and represents the horrible past of our country.

These are some of the reasons why Park should acknowledge what promoting one single holiday and not showing inclusivity can do to its community. If Park still doesn’t change and continues to promote Thanksgiving, then we have to talk about all the aspects of this holiday, including its history. But I also hope that Park and the administration can make more of an effort to include other holidays.