Jon Dusza, Managing Editor
I am a Bills fan. This is my eleventh season having season tickets with my dad. The Bills are incredibly important in my life; there are very few things which have a higher priority for me than a Bills game. The Bills have been bad for most of my life, and I vividly remember watching Thanksgiving football games, longing for my beloved Bills to be in the national spotlight. When the Bills beat the Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving in 2019, it made that Thanksgiving the best I ever had – it was nothing less than a dream come true. Five years, and multiple Bills Thanksgiving games later, when I saw that the NFL schedule this year did not have the Bills playing on Thanksgiving, I breathed a sigh of relief.
I wrote at the outset that as a kid, I had longed for the Bills to play on Thanksgiving. Younger me felt like a loser for religiously watching a losing team week in and week out, and would have killed for a team so good as to be a major draw on Thanksgiving for the NFL, like the Bills have been these last few years. To the kid who felt like a loser for rooting for those terrible teams, nothing seemed more like heaven than the idea of watching the Bills on Thanksgiving.
Having experienced good Bills teams playing on Thanksgiving, I do not think that Thanksgiving is the place to get overly invested in a football game. I do not mean to get all preachy about the “true meaning of Thanksgiving,” but there is something nice about having a day where everything else can be put on as background noise, and family time becomes the top priority. We do not get such an opportunity often, so it is nice when that opportunity is not corrupted by the stress of a football game that you have to care about.
Sometimes, we just need a break from things, even from things we love. The Bills – for my family, and I am sure for hundreds of thousands of others throughout the Buffalo area and the country – are a thing to bond over: but so is Thanksgiving. The thing about Thanksgiving is that it is a way to bond with family for the sake of bonding with family, without any third party taking up all of the attention.
For me, the novelty of watching my favorite team on Thanksgiving, knowing that the rest of the country is watching it too, has worn off a little bit. The idea of it gave me more excitement than the reality of it. The process of the novelty wearing off has, however, taught me that Thanksgiving, and holidays in general, are a time to try to avoid the stressors of daily life and have cheer with loved ones. Yelling at the TV over a football game gets in the way of that.
There is no greater combination in the world than Thanksgiving and football, so long as that football is not Bills football.
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