Recycled curtains from royal palaces are used to cover foot stools and being auctioned for charity.

You are so tired! I can tell because I’m tired too. In a couple of days, tens of millions of Americans will get on planes or trains or highways, crunching our limbs in godless ways for hours on end, worrying if we left the stove on or packed enough layers. We will fight the crowds, brave the chaos, pay the money. And then we will get to wherever we’re going, and we’ll eat. It will probably be lovely, or maybe it will be bad, but either way, it will be a little nuts because we will then (then!), in less than the time it takes a carton of half-and-half to go bad, do it all again.

Or at least many of us, those who are gluttons for punishment, will. We’ll move our bodies and our belongings around the country during precisely the time of year when the climate becomes, in many places, dark, wet, icy, and freezing—again. We’ll contemplate togetherness, and family, and potatoes—again. Maybe we’ll watch football—again. Many of us will eat turkey—again. We’ll pack all our traveling and relative-wrangling and big-mealing into one overstuffed, exhausting month, and for no extrinsic reason.

There’s a better way to do things, and in fact another country already does it. That country is Canada, and it celebrates Thanksgiving in October. We should too.

Canadian Thanksgiving is the second Monday of October, though many people observe it over the weekend. To preserve some tradition, I propose we reschedule ours to fall on the Thursday before Canada’s holiday. Superfans of the calendar may notice that this is the same long weekend as Indigenous Peoples’ Day/Columbus Day, which seems fine—they’d each have their own days, and besides, you can probably appreciate that there’s some thematic overlap here. So we’d have Thanksgiving Thursday and another holiday Monday, creating one mega-long weekend, and then roll gently into Halloween. After that, we’d have a whole month to avoid interstate travel and its attendant costs, spiritual and financial. We’d get our blood sugar in order before the holiday-party season begins in earnest.

[Read: The no-drama Thanksgiving]

Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations can easily commingle if we want them to—a squash is a squash—and we’d get to celebrate the bounty of the harvest during the actual harvest. In the parts of the country where the leaves turn, they would be beautiful. Everywhere, it would be a little warmer, a little easier to schlep around. We’d let the holiday season stretch out long and easy, making time for Thanksgiving on its own terms, rather than treating it like the dress rehearsal for Christmas. We could still eat the same stuff, still have a parade, and still, I’m sure, go shopping the next day. The only difference is the timing, which will now have been made rational.

We tend to think of Thanksgiving as something fixed—part of our national topography, like Mount Rushmore. A major feature of holidays is, after all, that they are pretty much the same every year. But another major feature is that they are social constructs, and Thanksgiving has been changing basically since it was invented. The first Thanksgiving—the one many of us learned about in school, the one with the Pilgrims—is believed by historians to have taken place sometime between September and November, and aside from being a meal, it had almost nothing to do with our modern celebration.

In 1789, George Washington and the first Congress did declare Thursday, November 26, a “Day of public Thanksgiving,” but this wasn’t enshrined anywhere in perpetuity: For decades, the holiday was just observed ad hoc by individual governments and families when events warranted giving thanks, which meant not necessarily in the same way, or on the same day, or even in same month, or at all. Not until the 19th century did the Thanksgiving we now know come to be, in part because Sarah Hale, the editor of an influential women’s magazine, decided America needed a holiday that honored the domestic sphere—that is, the topics her magazine covered—and celebrated Protestant values. For years, she “badgered” the government about this, according to the historian Anne Blue Wills, and in 1863, Abraham Lincoln, hoping to unite the nation while war cleaved it apart, acquiesced: Thanksgiving was now a federal holiday, celebrated permanently on the last Thursday of November.

Not that permanently, though, because 76 years later, we moved it. In 1939, Thanksgiving fell on the last day of the month, and retailers worried that a late start to the Christmas-shopping season would depress sales. Fred Lazarus Jr., the chairman of the company that would later become Macy’s, lobbied President Franklin D. Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving a week earlier, to the second-to-last Thursday of the month. Lazarus was successful, though the whole thing did not go over super well. Football coaches were enraged, having seen their big-ticket games suddenly moved from a major holiday to a random Thursday. A political rival of Roosevelt’s accused him of acting with “the omnipotence of Hitler.” The Three Stooges mocked the change in a short film. Only 23 of the 48 states honored the new date, and until 1941 we had two Thanksgivings, a week apart. Finally, Congress passed a resolution declaring Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday of November, where it has remained ever since.

My point is that we as a society are pretty resilient. I think we can handle changing Thanksgiving again. It seems unlikely that retailers will mind much, and I’m sure that if given enough notice, the football coaches can prepare. And Thanksgiving, as many Americans’ favorite secular celebration, deserves better. At its best, the holiday welcomes people regardless of religion or relationship status, and it doesn’t even require them to bring a gift. It pulls us together with the people we love and honors one of the highest art forms of human existence: gratitude, though on Thanksgiving the more apt word is the one Buddhists use—katannuta, “to have a sense of what was done.”

[Read: How to be thankful when you don’t feel thankful]

Thanksgiving has changed along with the country. We started celebrating it in November because of, “basically, one woman’s understanding of the national calendar,” as Wills told me, and then we moved it because some guy named Fred asked the president to. We have made and remade it to serve the needs of nationalism, business, politics. What’s stopping us from remaking it again?

Editor’s Note: On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear Therapist” in your inbox.

Dear Therapist,

My husband and I have been together for five years. In that time, his parents have separated and are now divorcing. My husband and his two sisters are not particularly close with either parent because of their less-than-ideal childhood.

As adults, my husband and his siblings have established their own holiday traditions. My husband spends most holiday time with my family, and his siblings spend theirs with their in-laws. Before the divorce, my brother and his siblings would all get together with their parents for a simple dinner or gift exchange every year (for both Thanksgiving and Christmas), but now there’s no plan to bring the different parts of the family together.

In recent weeks, both parents, who each live by themselves, have started hinting at not wanting to be alone during the holidays and hoping to potentially join our plans. Neither parent seems willing to host—they just want the invitation. My sisters-in-law have made it clear that they won’t be inviting their parents to their plans with their own in-laws. This leaves my husband feeling like the onus is on us to “take care” of his parents by including them in our plans, which are really my family’s plans.

What’s the right move here? Ask my family to include them knowing that it shakes up our dynamic, or figure out how to navigate his parents truly being alone for the holidays?

Dear Reader,

I empathize with the fantasy that there’s an objective “right move” in this situation, but the reality is that different choices will have different consequences, none more “right” than the others. The best you can do is reflect on the options and, with the clarity that comes from reflection, choose the one that feels best for now.

I say “for now” because whatever you do this year isn’t what you have to do forever. Your extended family is going through a significant transition, and at this time next year, and in the years to come, the dynamics will shift and settle. Eventually, your husband’s parents might be fine attending a gathering together, or one or both might find a new partner and have other places to go. Holiday plans that make sense this year might look completely different in the future.

That should take some pressure off, because if whatever you do this year doesn’t work out as well as you hope, you can view the decision as nothing more than a well-intentioned and temporary experiment.

To help you design that experiment, let’s first think about the bigger dynamics at play. The reason you and your husband feel so conflicted is that your question touches on a complex intersection of family loyalty, emotional boundaries, and holiday expectations—each of which, by itself, is weighty and fraught. Add to this some painful childhood history, and it’s easy to feel confused and pulled in different directions. Even so, your family had come up with a viable solution, and now this divorce has transformed what was once a manageable annual gathering into something even more complicated.

[Read: The only two choices I’ve ever made]

I want to emphasize the impact of this divorce not just on your holiday plans, but on the family as a whole. Although your husband and his siblings aren’t particularly close with their parents, I imagine that they’re still dealing with the emotions of what’s known as “gray divorce”—a divorce that occurs later in life and that creates unique challenges for adult children. Many people assume that parental divorce affects adult children less significantly than young children, but it can be just as destabilizing, in different ways. Many adult children find themselves in exactly your husband’s position—managing their parents’ emotional needs while trying to maintain their own family structures and traditions.

On a deeper level, a late-in-life divorce signals a fundamental shift in family identity—even if your husband’s parents were less than ideal, he saw himself as being part of an intact family—and he has some adjusting to do. For one, he may be experiencing role reversal, in which adult children tend to take on a quasi-parental role and feel responsible for their parents’ well-being. He may also be feeling pulled back into certain unhealthy family dynamics that he would rather avoid. Notice how the divorce has highlighted different coping strategies among the siblings. Your sisters-in-law have chosen strict boundaries in upholding their in-laws’ traditions, whereas your husband feels pulled toward accommodation. This divergence can lead to resentment reminiscent of long-standing family roles (for example, was your husband historically the “responsible” or “peacemaking” child?). And finally, he may be feeling stuck in the middle of his parents’ newly separated lives, forced to navigate competing needs and perceived obligations.

For all of these reasons, you might want to have a conversation with your husband about his emotional response to his parents’ divorce. What does it bring up for him? How does it affect his relationship with his siblings and whether he feels alone or supported as his family goes through this change? What’s driving his sense of responsibility to “take care” of his parents? Is it a genuine desire for connection, is it simply guilt, or is there also a sense of real compassion? Once you understand more about how he feels, the two of you can have a candid conversation about the three interconnected challenges you as a couple are facing: your husband’s feeling of obligation to his parents, your commitment to your own family’s traditions, and the broader question of how much responsibility adult children bear for their parents’ emotional well-being.

[Read: Couples therapy, but for siblings]

If you can have these conversations with grace and empathy—for each other, for yourselves, and for his parents—you’ll likely find that they not only help you understand each other better, but that the options are less binary than you presented in your letter.

For instance, you can ask his parents to join your family without “shaking up” your family dynamic by not focusing so much on whether his parents are having a good time, and just letting everyone be. You can choose not to invite his parents to your family’s holiday gatherings but also not leave them “truly alone”—by calling or doing FaceTime instead, perhaps including some real-time virtual cooking or gift-opening. Alternatively, you can still do the simple dinner and gift exchange you’ve always done with both parents by telling them that if they don’t feel comfortable being in the same room together, they can always say no—but that’s what you’re able to offer given that you have two families to consider, and three celebrations are just too many. Or you can decide that doing another simple dinner and gift exchange isn’t that burdensome (because, as you say, it’s “simple”) and invite them individually for a version of the traditional plan—or schedule even shorter, separate visits with each of them.

As you become more flexible with the possibilities, remember that the goal isn’t to solve their loneliness but to help them adapt to their new reality in a healthy way. Maybe that involves connecting them with community resources or social groups for divorced seniors, encouraging them to build their own new traditions and actively engage with their existing social connections while pursuing new ones.

All of these are valid ways to experiment with creating holiday celebrations that balance compassion for his parents with respect for your own family’s needs and joy. As you do this, keep in mind that part of “taking care” of your husband’s parents is helping them build independent lives post-divorce—and that this is one of the most caring things adult children can do.

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

It was left in a Shrewsbury cemetery after filming ended on a 1984 adaptation of A Christmas Carol.

The holiday season is here, and for many shoppers, that means gifts are still on the to-do list before the last-minute rush sets in. Today marks National Shopping Reminder Day, a timely nudge to take action before the 30-day countdown to Christmas begins.

Read more...

Sir Sajid Javid and Baronness Floella Benjamin will also take the editorial reins over Christmas.

Forty years on, the Band Aid song continues to generate debate about the way it presents Africa.

The TV presenter and former racing driver from Surrey is to compete in the Christmas Strictly show.

It comes after the Prince and Princess of Wales met families of those killed in the attack.

The first official photo from the final Gavin and Stacey episode is released ahead of Christmas Day.