November traditionally marks the beginning of the holiday season. The day after Halloween, thoughts of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve begin, even subconsciously, to inundate our days.

As holiday stress mounts, we tend to forget the true reasons for these holidays. The chance to reacquaint with family after being away for most of the year. The beauty of sharing special times with the ones we love. These times can be lost in a whirlwind of holiday stress.

This problem of misaligned priorities during the holiday season has been documented many times. A friend of mine said her family declared they will never celebrate Christmas again after last year.

It's easy to forget the meaning of the holiday seasons, but sometimes it's easy to forget some holidays exist at all. For example, Veterans Day is this Thursday. If it's easy to forget the meaning of Christmas (or a different religion's comparative holiday), then it's a breeze to forget holidays like Veterans Day.

This year's Veterans Day will be indicative of every other holiday in the United States when we don't get the day off. Most of us won't even notice.

Sunday's Denver Post reported that, even with unseasonably warm weather, only a handful of people attended Saturday's Veterans Day parade in Denver. The Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Fort Collins only knew of three events held to honor Fort Collins' vets. All three were put together by the VFW. Fort Collins doesn't even have a parade. Regional cities such as Colorado Springs and Pueblo do have parades, but they boast a larger population of war vets.

Imagine being a vet and looking out on a parade that had everything but a crowd. It might sting a bit.

Whenever the United States enters a foreign conflict, the U.S. military is sent in to implement the decisions of our government. These are real people sent to fight real wars. People die; they die on both sides of the battle.

The Berlin Wall fell exactly 10 years ago tomorrow. As students today, we don't remember the wall going up, or the war that was fought before. We don't know the climate of a society that was sending its young men overseas to fight a war of epic proportions. As students now, we read about these events in textbooks and take notes about them in stuffy lectures.

Try going out and talking to a veteran about what they saw in war. Ask them how they felt. I bet their feelings won't correspond with the empirical historical view we have been taught in our years of education.

This Thursday, even though school will still be in session, try and remember the hundreds of thousands whom have served in wars. If you're sitting in a history class, think how it would be to fight those wars instead of merely learning about them.

Nikolaus Olsen is a columnist for the Rocky Mountain Collegian. He is a student at Colorado State University.

The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Observer

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