Steve Bannon Calls for Return to Thanksgiving ‘Traditionalism,’ Slams Black Friday Consumerism

circa 1955: A Thanksgiving turkey comes to the table watched by the family. (Photo by Evan
Evans/Three Lions/Getty

Breitbart News executive chairman and former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon said in an interview with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily radio show that the United States must return to “traditionalism” when it comes to the holiday season while slamming the “disturbing” consumerism that has consumed Thanksgiving.

In a conversation on the importance of Thanksgiving for Americans, Bannon blasted current trends where the holiday has been sidelined by corporations to push consumerism, commodify Christmas and sell cheap products.

“The thing disturbing now is all the Christmas decorations now come up on 1 November,” Bannon said. “And here’s the thing I tell people: It used to be 12 days of Christmas and Christmas would follow through. Now the day after Christmas,  the 25th… it’s gone.”

“You know you get all the way up to Christmas and on the 26th, it’s all gone,” Bannon continued. “Our push now at Breitbart is to go back to traditionalism, let’s have a run-up… do Halloween, have a beautiful run-up to Thanksgiving and then the day after do your Christmas parades and everything like that… and then at Christmas, we’re going to roll through the 12 days of Christmas into the New Year.”

Bannon noted a speech made by Pope John Paul II, where he spoke directly on how a devotion to God, the Creator, had been replaced in the modern world by materialism and consumerism.

“I’m really anti-consumerism,” Bannon said. “I remember a talk that Pope John Paul gave, I think it was in Sicily 20 or 30 years ago, where he really said that consumerism had become one of the great evils of the 20th Century as the materialistic had taken over from the spiritual and it’s something that we got to monitor.”

“I’ve been so proud of this site because I think we were the first news site to really go after this studying of Black Friday… and a lot of it was sitting there and going ‘Hey, probably half the families, half the families have dinner, Thanksgiving Dinner, probably at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, the other half have it around five or six.'”

“To do what? To go to Wal-Mart and throw a sharp elbow so you can get a TV, you know a big screen TV. So that you can watch more NFL football, right?” Bannon said.

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

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John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

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