Every year, the Christmas lights seem to go up a little earlier than the year before. The stores bring out their Holiday merchandise before the average temperature even drops to 60. No sooner have we put away our barbecue grills and patio furniture than we are bombarded with catalogs hawking Yuletide savings.

With Christmas sales accounting for a sizeable chunk of a store’s yearly revenue, retailers have continually moved up the start of the holiday in hopes of drawing more shoppers through their doors. In doing so, many Americans have become so caught up in Christmas that they forgot to celebrate Thanksgiving.

“We just freakin’ forgot it,” says Jane Wildbush of Topeka, Kansas. “I had this sense that we were missing something, but the family was so caught up in Christmas, what with all the decorations and stuff being up the day after Halloween. Then one day I was standing at the freezer, wondering why I had a 16 pound turkey taking up all my space, when it hit me.”

Pumpkin pies piled up on store shelves. Cornucopias rotted away in warehouses. Picture books portraying Pilgrims and Indians sharing a banquet instead of hacking each other to pieces were never even shipped. By trying to capitalize on one holiday, America had forsaken another. That is until last week when Congress finally stepped in. In a rare bipartisan effort, a bill was passed combining Thanksgiving and Christmas into “Thanxmas,” a new month-long holiday orgy of food, spending, and liberal vacation day policies.

“We want America to continue hemorrhaging its hard-earned dollars to our nation’s retailers at Christmas time, but we don’t want them to forget to celebrate the day that the pilgrims defeated the Indians in the country’s first football game,” said Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. “By combining the two, we can preserve our cultural past while ensuring our economic future.”

Some religious groups protested the combination of holiday names, claiming that “Christgiving” would be more appropriate as it maintains the emphasis on our lord and savior without whom there would be no football to give thanks for. In response to the charges, members of the House Holiday Reoganization Committe issued a statement saying they would give the matter serious thought, and might even propose changing the name to “Christgiving” just as soon as America’s churches ponied up enough dough to trump the check written by the pumpkin pie manufacturers and paper turkey centerpiece makers.