Thankfulness Every Day

The holiday season is upon us and after the tricks, treats, and wonderful costumes and fun of Halloween, the seriousness of Thanksgiving settles in before the big Christmas rush-around catches everyone. 

The newspaper is preparing its Thanksgiving edition and many of the writers are listing things for which they are thankful. It’s important. It’s important to remember we have a lot to be thankful for. However, what gets me is how many items on those lists are the same. I could copy and paste quite a bit of their lists into my own because, for the most part, we are all thankful for the same things (or types of things) in our lives.

I’ve always strived to be a different. Even as an artist, I don’t want to do the same thing everyone else is doing or I don’t want to do it exactly the same way. And so, in my thanks, I don’t want to list the same things that are prevalent on others’ lists. (Such as being thankful for this wonderful country, family, etc., which to me are givens.) Of course, we are thankful for these things and we cannot say thank you enough. 

Thanksgiving Day, the holiday, a time for family and get-togethers, changed dramatically for me in later years. My thoughts of Thanksgiving bring memories of family with Ma and Dad preparing dinner (which, along with Christmas dinner, was eaten around noon). The memory holds love, laughter, warmth, and the smell of good food and plenty of it. Later years, when I became an adult and the children were young, the holiday still had some of that feeling. 

Times changed. Choices were made. Lives came and went. The holiday within the family changed. The entire holiday season… fell apart for me. All those old memories were just that – memories. The feeling of the holidays changed and I made the decision to pull back and drop out. It was my choice and I did not do this to slight family, but to protect them from my… sadness. Maybe this just means that I was unwilling to change with the times. (Although the past couple of years I did come out of holiday isolation to go out to Thanksgiving dinner with my brother, his wife, her sister, and husband and it was good.)

There is more. Thanksgiving is not just a one-day-a-year event for me. I celebrate thankfulness every day. Every night I say gratitude prayers at bedtime. I snug down under the covers and have an entire litany of prayers and thanks that I run through before falling asleep. Goodness, there is so much to be grateful for that the list could go on and on. Sometimes I feel like a broken record repeating things. But I AM so grateful!

So, what can I add to my list that is not exactly the same as on other lists? What can I add to my list that is different from last year’s list? Oh, yes, I have a list. Stay tuned.