Something I am going to have to adjust to is new holiday traditions. For thanksgiving, usually in the past I'd spend the night before helping my mom prep for the next day. The next morning we'd watch and listen to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade while cooking. The next day we'd maybe go out shopping (not like the nutty kind of shoppers - we just take our chances at seeing what deals we can stumble upon). If Thanksgiving is late enough in the month we usually get a tree and then we decorate it. Then over the month of December we bake a lot, exchange gifts on Christmas morning, and have a Christmas dinner.
And according to my boyfriend, he has not been present for Thanksgiving or Christmas since he started working at his current workplace which seriously bums me out. I can't afford to go home for the holidays and he's all I have here. So basically I will be alone both days. I absolutely loath companies that force it's employees to work on those holidays. I won't get into the topic of Thanksgiving's history (I'm well aware of it) and the fact that Christmas is in favor of Christians but less accommodating to other religion's holidays, but the fact is that they're both national holidays, and whether you partake in those holidays are not, a lot of people take advantage of that time off for togetherness.
I don't even know if he'd be anywhere near as enthusiastic as me for either holiday. I doubt it. I already offered to give us a thanksgiving dinner on another day, like the day before, or the day after, and he said it wasn't that big of a deal to him. I tend to gravitate to people who didn't celebrate the holidays to the extent that I did.
I do this on Christmas Eve with my family. On that day we usually finish cooking all of our 12 meals for the dinner, everyone takes a shower and dresses really nicely before we have dinner by 6pm, after that we all sit down to open gifts and just because I can't be there, doesn't mean I can't be part of itm so I call my family on Skype, dressing up really nicely like all of the rest of my family, and then I/we (if the husband is home, though he does work usually) watch them open their gifts, we talk to them and we enjoy our time together.
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But I really appreciate people who can appreciate the fact that their loved ones are excited and happy about something and experience the happiness through them. More and more of my friends are being outward about their joy and excitement for Halloween. I in particular don't care for Halloween, and I think the aesthetic is corny and campy but I love seeing my friends getting excited for it and I'd definitely partake in any festivities and plans if they wanted me to. So if the person can't grasp that concept I tend to not want to give them a gift (nor do I expect a gift from them obviously).