LET'S GIVE THANKS!

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now that all the Christmas decorations, party ware and gifts galore jump out at us at every turn it must to time for Thanksgiving. Yea, the “Holiday” we stuff (get it) between Halloween and Christmas, remember the one? The one that is bland and colorless on the plate as my mother the gourmet chef always stated. The one that takes three straight days to plan, shop, cook, bake, stir, whisk, blend, chop, boil, stuff, steam, cream, mix, burn, over bake, under bake, yea, you know the one! And Voila it takes fifteen minutes to eat…and our pants and skirts are much too tight and we swear that we will NEVER eat this much ever againJ…remembering now? And to say nothing of the dishes that we are washing for two days…The Holiday that my Mom loved but disliked the prep, preparing, purging and cleanup - only because it is bland and colorless:). But it was her favorite one for what it represents.

Just when you think the world, country, state, city, county, neighborhood can’t get any more tumultuous we must think of our forefathers who risked their lives to sail through the stormy treacherous seas to get to Plymouth Rock to create a new world for themselves and for generations to come. All this came back to me while watching Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving on TV this week...good ole Charlie, what a CLASSIC. In its simplest terms Charlie tells the story well. Let’s all give thanks for the people around us and not the “stuff.” Forgive people and move on…Give thanks to people around you for next year the table could look significantly different.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all. ~William Faulkner