Thanksgiving: turkey, football and Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Thanksgiving Day is getting closer. This North American holiday is celebrated on the 4th Thursday of November, in other words, on the 23th this year. Most families will be sitting in their sofa's watching Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC: marching bands, dancers, Dora and other cartoon characters parading across Broadway. There are also men who, on the one hand, will be watching the National Football League ( NFL) while, on the other hand, their wives will be cooking the traditional stuffed turkey and pumpkin pie for dinner. But originally Thanksgiving was not all of this, it is rather a day to be thankful for daily gifts: food, shelter, clothing, good health, friendship,... So cartoons and football have actually nothing to do with Thanksgiving. Haven't holidays got commercialized? This video sure shows that Thanksgiving has.
At school, children learn about the first Thanksgiving when the pilgrims, in the autumn of 1621, invited their neighbour Native Americans to celebrate the colony's first successful harvest. They also made it a "thank you" celebration to the Indian tribe for teaching them the survival skills they needed to make it in the New World. But all the Americans seem to remember today is the big feast where the pilgrims and the Native Americans ate together which originally was not the aim of the celebration. They even have transformed some of it: e.g. the pumpkin pie could not have been cooked at that time since the supply of flour had been long diminished, so there was no bread or pastries of any kind.
The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which is celebrating its 80th birthday this year, shows each year less and less about Thanksgiving. It is rather showing more and more about Christmas as if they want us to pass from one holiday to an other. In addition, one can see during this famous parade giant balloons looking like cartoon characters or like the last toy in vogue floating through New York and driving kids nuts. This rather looks like an ad for Disney and all sorts of toys.
The most surprising "new tradition" - as it calls itself - is the NFL, as if the pilgrims could play a match against the Native Americans after their so-called feast. But where does this tradition come from? This is another mystery to be solved concerning the way Americans celebrate their holidays.
All this seems to confirm the sad trend of commercializing holidays. People transform holidays and adopt them to their times and thus - what the 21th century concerns - give them a new economic aspect.