Thanksgiving, the red-headed stepchild of the holiday season, goes largely underappreciated, sandwiched as it is between Halloween and Christmas. Those other two holidays overshadow Thanksgiving like older siblings who were always better at athletics and academics and to whom everyone looks up to with a sense of adoration.

Halloween and Christmas get all the acclaim in the pantheon of American holidays. The level of expectancy and commercialization that is heaped on those two days has led to the entire last quarter of every year being devoted to “getting ready for the holidays”. Halloween has that fun spooky vibe, costumes, and trick or treating while Christmas — in its secular form — is gift giving, decorations and beloved mythical characters. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving’s claim to fame is overeating and trying to avoid those “crazy” relatives who spew their political views that no one really wants to hear at the dinner table.

But of course, there’s more to it and we should give Thanksgiving the recognition it deserves. A good start in doing so would be calling it by its proper name. Not Turkey Day! Using that moniker is like calling Christmas “Presents Day,” Easter “Egg Day” or the Fourth of July “Firecracker Day.” Frankly, it’s disrespectful, and a day dedicated to family, friends and home deserves better.

Thanksgiving doesn’t even rate its own commercial advertising season. From September to Halloween, it’s all bats and witches and candy commercials on TV. Then right after Halloween, here come the Christmas commercials — if they even waited that long. Those happy ho-ho-ho pitches for your hard-earned dollars arrive stealthily, as if they don’t want Thanksgiving to notice that it’s being ignored yet again. Once that feast day is over, the full onslaught of Christmas commercialization kicks in.

It used to be you could tell what time of the season it was by the decorations being hawked in the box stores, but no more. Nowadays, you’re greeted by 12-foot ghouls, flying witches and stacked pumpkins in your face as soon as you enter Lowes starting in September. The day after Halloween? It’s 12-foot Santas, reindeers and Grinches, with nary an inflatable turkey or pilgrim to be found.

Halloween and Christmas also get a boost in their popularity from the shows that many of us eagerly anticipated and watched when we were growing up. There were the Peanuts specials, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman” and, of course, “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” But not so much for Thanksgiving. I mean who can forget Charlie Brown’s Christmas, with Snoopy decorating his doghouse and that classic Charlie Brown tree, all set to the best holiday album ever recorded? Or the Charlie Brown Halloween special, with Linus waiting in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin while Charlie gets a rock at every house he trick-or-treats at. But who among us can remember, I mean like seriously recall, the storyline of the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special, if you even knew there was one?

Maybe Thanksgiving needs a makeover to compete with its more popular holiday brethren. We could start an urban legend about the Grand Turkey. This holiday bird, purportedly a fowl pardoned by the White House in the past, comes to everyone’s house in between the afternoon and evening NFL games, while folks are sleeping off the tryptophan they’ve ingested. The Grand Turkey springs alive and kicking from the oven to deliver gifts of cash to all the children who have been good since last Thanksgiving and show appreciation of family and gratitude for the things they have. Just think, candy and costumes in October, cash and pie in November, and presents and Santa in December! With that, Thanksgiving will take its rightful place as a peer to those other end of year holidays, completing the bacchanalia of overindulgence.

But seriously, I think Thanksgiving may be the most important holiday of the year. What it lacks in glamour and abundance of movies centered around it (when was the last time you asked someone if they’d like to stay home and watch a Thanksgiving movie?), it makes up for with its focus on home and family and friends. And in the end those things are more important and keep one far more grounded than ghosts and flying reindeer. So Happy Thanksgiving to all and may the Grand Turkey bless you and yours.