We’re done getting spooky, October’s over. One month until December, when Christmas is in the air.

But what’s that I hear? Christmas music. Yuletide decorations in stores.

Calm down. It’s November. This is Thanksgiving season. There’s a very important holiday before all those winter ones, and these days we need it more than ever.

I would love to spend a few hours ranting about how much I hate people who play Christmas music before Thanksgiving, but that’s not really the point. Thanksgiving has been completely shelved from a cultural standpoint; We now go straight from Halloween to the holidays with maybe a bit of shopping in between.

It’s been this way for awhile, but it’s been getting slowly worse over the last few years. Black Friday has been gaining popularity so rapidly in the past decade that Thanksgiving seems to stand in its shadow. Then came Cyber Monday. Now Small Business Saturday is a thing, apparently.

Guess you can’t commercialize a nice dinner with the family beyond selling NFL ads and turkeys.

There’s the ever popular riffing about how much some people hate going home to see their families on Thanksgiving. Certainly not everyone has to like their family, and not everyone has a healthy familial situation either. Certainly there’s going to be political debates, conversations you want to duck out of and awkward situations.

Certainly not everyone has to like Thanksgiving, just like not everyone has to like Halloween or Christmas or any other holiday. But I think everyone should give it more attention than it’s getting.

Thanksgiving is a time where we celebrate togetherness and being grateful for what we already have right here, right now. These are both concepts I feel America needs to take to heart in 2017.

In these incredibly divided times, taking a little time to set aside the many, many things we vehemently disagree upon and simply deciding to love each other for awhile might be a crucial  step in healing. Maybe it’d be good for all of us to treat Thanksgiving as seriously as the many holidays that are cutting into its celebration time.

This Thanksgiving, reach across the table for more than just to grab a serving of cheesy potatoes.

And don’t you dare play “All I Want for Christmas is You” until you’re driving out to shop the next morning.