In the United States, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, ending a period when many people complain about Christmas coming earlier and earlier. If it isn’t the advertisements, it’s the music that somehow reaches our hearing earlier than expected. While I know many people love Christmas music and don’t mind hearing it almost all year, others are bothered by having Christmas overwhelm Thanksgiving—and I admit that I wonder if too much Christmas might reduce the impact of the holiday.

This year I began thinking about the relationship between the two holidays. Because the controversy over when the Christmas season starts almost puts the two holidays in some kind of competition, I am looking for ways that the two holidays can work together, perhaps reducing the commercial focus so prevalent today.

You may have already figured out how to make Thanksgiving and Christmas work together. If not, there are a couple of ideas that occurred to me:

Thanksgiving is about giving thanks—which is both a gospel principle in several ways (thanking God and thanking others, to start with) and a kind of spiritual practice. We regularly thank God for the sacrifice of His son in prayer, so focusing the Thanksgiving holiday on that connects well with Christmas.

In addition, the four weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are a good fit with many advent programs. Traditionally, as I understand it, advent celebrations are four weeks long, and when my family has tried it, we have had a little family program on each of the four Sunday nights between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This makes Thanksgiving weekend a convenient time to kick-off the advent program.

This is a nice contrast to the commercial “holiday season”, which has co-opted Thanksgiving and the beginning of the season for making purchases. Combating the forces of advertising and the focus on both receiving and holding on to what we have is a longstanding theme of our Christmas literature, music, theatre and film.

So, what do you do to unite the themes of this holiday period? If you live in the U.S., how do you connect Thanksgiving and Christmas? How can we do Thanksgiving AND Christmas better?