But why should Thanksgiving be more popular?

Last year I spent time showing evidence that Thanksgiving was the least popular of the three major holidays during the fourth quarter of the year.  However I might not have clearly established why this was a problem in need of correcting.  Well, the reasons for needing to enhance Thanksgiving's position in the holiday pantheon are as follows.  Note that this is all very United States-centric; I don't care about Thanksgiving being in competition with the Emperor's Birthday in Japan or something.

1. Halloween and Christmas are essentially religious holidays.  Granted, the pagan origins of Halloween are heavily obscured in its observance these days, but not enough to the point that it doesn't court controversy.  Alternatives to Halloween are commonly offered up by Christians, this year there was a big push for Jesusween.   The thing is, Christians (including its  myriad variations) make up about 76% of the country's population.  Those outside of Christianity have their own alternatives such as Hanukkah for Jews, Kwanzaa for black people, and Eid al-Adha for Muslims.
2. Thanksgiving, being a non-religious holiday, is thus open to all Americans.  This makes it especially important as a holiday to encourage everyone to participate in given that one of the ideas America was founded on was to not endorse one religion over another.  It might be a little weird for a Jewish person to invite his Muslim neighbor to share in celebrating Hanukkah.  There are a lot of racial divides there.  However anyone should be able to celebrate Thanksgiving together.
3. Thanksgiving is distinctly American.  All of those religious holidays can be celebrated anywhere else in the world where there's a large enough concentration of people of that religion.  Even Halloween is celebrated worldwide, including China where it's called Teng Chieh.  Yes, the Canadians have a Thanksgiving, but it's at a different time (also considered the wrong time.)  The Japanese have one, too, but that's more akin to America's Labor Day (these days; it's timing is based on a harvest festival.)
4. Thanksgiving is an awesome holiday, emphasizing food.  Now that the touchy feely crap is out of the way let's consider that every holiday has its thing.  Valentine's Day is about kisses and stuff, the Fourth July has its explosions and marching bands, Halloween entails scares and candy.  Thanksgiving?  Any reasonable person will associate Thanksgiving with a feast (the unreasonable ones, in attempting to sound all deep, will wax poetic about spending time with family and reflecting.)  Food is awesome.  We, as living things, need food.  We don't need explosions in the sky or even candy.  As such, Thanksgiving is a holiday that focuses on something universal that everybody can agree to.
5. It's controversial.  Building on the idea of American Thanksgiving being uniquely American is the controversy around it.  On the one hand, people love to kvetch about how Thanksgiving marks the beginning of Europeans' encroachment on these lands and the eventual demise of the Native Americans.  On the other hand, it's the only major holidays that acknowledges the Native Americans.   Sure, there's a Native American Day celebrated on the fourth Friday of September, but when was the last time anybody even mentioned that (besides right now)?  Christians may have contend with some opposition to their views around Christmas, but that's something that affects the religion.  The controversy around the Native Americans becomes a distinctly American issue.

So there, five reasons why Thanksgiving deserves to be more important than Christmas and Halloween.  See my posts from last year for the evidence of Thanksgiving not being more popular than them.  Hopefully, we can fix this problem in 2012!