GIVE THANKS

My daughters think I’m a little too chatty with checkers sometimes. No, not the game but the people standing behind cash registers, checking out my purchases.  Just the other day I gave the lady at Stein’s Garden Center my Thanksgiving “speech.” I couldn’t help it.

I had found a small resin statue of a Native American couple who were holding a cornucopia; on the bottom of the statue it read, “Give Thanks.” And I did. I was happy to find it. I often think we pay so much attention to the Pilgrims and the 1621 Thanksgiving feast that we forget about the folks who actually kept the English alive and enabled them to have the feast in the first place (it was the Wampanoag people). I found an accompanying, matching figurine of a Pilgrim couple and decided to purchase that, too. Even though neither statue depicted accurate native or Pilgrim dress, you can’t ask for everything (well, I guess you can but you’ll be disappointed!).

Actually, I was thrilled to find some Thanksgiving decorations at all. Long before we flip the calendar to October, Halloween arrives in the stores. They are awash in an overabundance (in my opinion) of orange and black – covered in creepy, stocked with sickening and gagging in ghoulish.  On the heels of that, Santa arrives – and often in the very next aisle. Red and green glitter and glitz compete with ghosts and goblins while we haven’t yet even stored away our swimsuits and sunscreen. If you locate a lost Pilgrim or wandering turkey in all of this, you’re fortunate.

It’s not that I am repulsed by Halloween or Christmas. We participate in both (although with a Halloween caveat: just cute cowboys and princesses and the like, please; blood and guts and gore are for the hospital emergency room, thank you very much). No one is forced to purchase any of the stores’ early season offerings. You don’t even have to look at them if you don’t want to. What bothers me is that so many of us focus so completely on the “gimme holidays” (you know, Halloween – “gimme candy” and Christmas – “gimme lots of other stuff”) and don’t take time in between to emphasize everything we’ve already been given. Thus, my Thanksgiving decorations.  If I see nice ones, I buy them and put them up; they help remind me to be grateful, appreciative and thankful – at Thanksgiving and the other 364 days of the year. I like the Alan Cohen quote:  “Appreciation is the highest form of prayer, for it acknowledges the presence of good wherever you shine the light of your thankful thoughts.”

The long story now told to you was the one I was telling the Stein’s checker the other day. From the odd, “I don’t care” look on her face, I suspect she agreed with my daughters’ “TMI” assessment (too much information) regarding the checker conversations. But I guess I don’t care. We are not a thankful people. I am often not a thankful person. We need frequent reminders of how much we have, what we’ve been given. We need to work hard to teach our children to be thankful (trust me, they won’t naturally turn out that way without instruction and God commands us to be thankful). Learning to be thankful will help us live better lives. So thought Daniel Defoe when he said, “All our discontents about what we want appeared to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.”

Psalm 107:1  Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.