Media & Thanksgiving

I celebrated Thanksgiving this year in New York with the family of a friend of mine. I never celebrated it before, so everything was new for me. However, I had already a little idea about how it would be. Back in the Netherlands, I would always see many American movies and sometimes they included the holiday Thanksgiving. I would always see them eating a very big turkey with stuffing, roasted ham, mashed potatoes with gravy and a lot of sweet desserts would be included as well. This typical movie moment influenced me in a way that I expected a dinner like that on my first Thanksgiving dinner at the family in New York.

Ever since the moment in which I arrived to New York, I have been seeing more and more advertisements about Thanksgiving in various media, like the new papers, television, and various social media. Most of those advertisements ranged from the store Walgreens to Macy’s. Those advertisements included families being together around a big table or sitting on the couch all warm together. I think that those advertisements also shaped my expectations of my first Thanksgiving night. I would expect a happy family sitting together being happy when having dinner and sitting at the couch afterwards.

Some advertisements that have influenced me a lot during the time before Thanksgiving, although they were Thanksgiving advertisements, were about the pumpkin flavors. The advertisement that influenced me the most was about the pumpkin trend is the one from Starbucks. This store has a lot of Thanksgiving coffee specials and has encouraged me to want to try all of those different coffee flavors. The very popular use of the pumpkin flavors during this holiday season has encouraged me to use it in various other foods. I have been influenced to even try to make pumpkin muffins to bring to the New York Thanksgiving dinner with the family of my friends, because I thought those would be a nice addition to the whole dinner.

The stores like Macy’s are stores that had a lot of advertisements for clothing and those advertisements gave me the impression that a typical Thanksgiving dinner would be in fancier and more dressy clothes than usual. These advertisements encouraged me in buying a fancy and expensive dress for the Thanksgiving dinner with the family of my friend. I actually bought it at Macy’s and I even found some jewelry to go with it. Those were smartly putted near by the fancy dresses in the store.

At last, I think that companies used the importance of Thanksgiving to make their advertisements even stronger. The advertisements encourage a lot of people to be with their family and airplane companies have some advertisements that try to make people fly to their families over Thanksgiving. Those advertisements gave me the impression that Thanksgiving is not about sitting home alone and that I should do something fun then. I therefore decided to go to New York on my own and later I got an invite to eat dinner with the family of my friend.