There are several times in a girl’s life when it is socially acceptable for her to gorge herself with food.

These times being Disneyworld, Christmas, birthdays, any and all vacations and of course, Thanksgiving.

I’m not sure where along the line of holiday traditions someone somewhere decided that we should spotlight food in our holiday and family celebrations, but there it is. It happened, and here we are eating and eating until one more crumb will make us explode.

I blame “the man” and his sick plot to feed us and feed us with food ads.

When you see a hot chick scantily dressed and making sex noises while drinking a Pepsi, you just have to have one because obviously each time you take a drink you will look like her and experience the same sweet, fizzy pleasure on your taste buds.

P.S. that’s just the aspartame you’re feeling, and, no, despite the ad, a Pepsi will not fulfill your sexual desires as it would seem by the model in the commercial.

I digress.

We have holiday dinners in order to spend time with family you only see a couple times per year and to enjoy the holiday cheer by way of food.

However, these “special holiday celebrations” quickly turn into a reason for all your obnoxious relatives to get together and eat extreme amounts of food until you all have food babies the size of a beach ball.

Then, to top it off, grandpa falls asleep on the recliner watching the Macy’s Day Parade snoring and stinking up the room with his turkey toots.

Thanksgiving is a twisted holiday in that sense. How did this happen? Because of clever advertisers who put turkeys in commercials with happy families smiling and laughing about how great their Butterball is.

You can tell yourself that Thanksgiving is about family and thankfulness all you want. Believe what you will, but I believe it’s just another advertising scam to sell food, get out of school, spend time with family members you don’t like and drown yourself in gravy. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all about spending time with family, and I’m definitely about destroying a pumpkin pie and some corn pudding.

What I’m not about is giving into “the man” and the fact that the essence of the things we hold dear to our hearts like holidays and engagements were fueled by advertising campaigns.

Take the diamond ring for example. I mean, did you really think that tradition was created by a sweet and devoted boyfriend who loved his girlfriend enough to buy her a diamond? Absolutely not. It was created by sleazy advertisers that changed the our concept of love and marriage.   

Furthermore, the American traditions that we know and hold dear to such as turkey, pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes probably came from an ads campaign to trick the American people into buying a product, aka the idea of family, harmony and love, and sold it to us in a can labeled “Thanksgiving,” right under our noses.

Column by Madison Wepfer, Assistant Features Editor