Happy Thanksgiving!

While I was getting ready for the Thanksgiving Day feast, it dawned on me that of all the holidays in the United States, Thanksgiving is the only major holiday without its own soundtrack. I don't know why this is, but it seems odd to me.

Christmas Music is a genre unto itself. Valentine's Day has any romantic songs as an appropriate soundtrack. St. Patrick's Day is the traditional stomping ground of any bawdy singalongs. New Year's Eve is filled with songs of reminisce, with "Auld Lang Syne" as the benchmark against which all others are judged. Even Independence Day, Veteran's Day, and Memorial Day have the canvas of patriotic songs that have been deemed "correct".

Yet Thanksgiving only has a few odd novelty songs that really don't do it justice, like Adam Sandler's "Thanksgiving Song". Why haven't we ever found a voice for Thanksgiving? Perhaps it has become so overshadowed by Christmas that nobody cares much about the spirit of Thanksgiving being expressed in song. We gorge ourselves on food, watch some TV, and get up before dawn the next day to fight the crowds and start our Christmas shopping in unison like so many lemmings racing off a cliff, leaving Thanksgiving as a faint memory of having extra time off work.

So what should Thanksgiving sound like? How do you express overeating, football, and the sneak preview of the family stress to come at Christmas? What suits it? Intimately happy songs like Christmas carols? Songs of gluttony and excess? Teen pop? Today the Jonas Brothers performed at a halftime show, which was strikingly odd - they were playing while surrounded by the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. It was jarring, but was it Thanksgiving music?

We need to find a voice for Thanksgiving. What does it sound like to you?