Practicing gratitude is always a good idea, but here, in Canada, we set aside the second weekend in October to give thanks particularly for the harvest. This is a wonderful season of the year, warm days, cold nights, the leaves turning to scarlet and gold, and the bounty of field and garden coming to fruition. Thanksgiving is one of my favourite holidays, not only because I love the harvest, but because it’s an excuse to feast with friends and family, to have a day off work and be done. No weeks of shopping, baking, wrapping, decorating, concert-going and entertaining. Décor can be as simple as a pumpkin on the doorstep or coloured leaves scattered across the dining room table. And when it’s over, it’s over. Cook the pumpkin and make pie. Throw the leaves in the compost, and life goes back to normal.
I might sound a bit like a curmudgeon and I do love Christmas, but I feel the “festivities” have replaced the “festival.” Thanksgiving, so far, has escaped that fate, although I have friends who love to ramp up the decorations.
While Thanksgiving in Canada celebrates the harvest of food crops, it doesn’t hurt to remember the other harvests in our lives. For a writer, a finished manuscript it a lot like harvest – a project that has been seeded and tended and weeded and cultivated and finally comes to fruition. For a knitter it could be a year’s worth of handknit socks, or afghans or dishcloths. For a potter it could be store full of thrown, fired, painted, glazed and fired again pottery.
In our lives we have relationships to nurture and be thankful for. Memories of loved ones who have passed but who still bless our spirits. Family who may frustrate and delight us in the space of a few minutes but who are “ours” bound together for life in the rich soup that is parents and children, cousins and aunts, in-laws and steps, siblings by birth or adoption. I’m never-endingly grateful for the messy, swirling mass of humanity that is my family.
I count Canada among my blessings, a beautiful land where we promote peace with our enemies and foster friendship with our neighbours.
My church– where I worship without fear– nurtures my soul and surrounds me with fellowship.
Newscasts of the day are filled with horrors, disasters, and evil deeds. It is easy to believe that the world is a dark and terrible place. As an antidote to that litany of grief, go count the pumpkins, and practice gratitude for the deeds that are loving, the people who race to help when disaster strikes, and for the everyday moments of compassion, heroism, and generosity that never make it to the nightly newscast. Those moments give us hope, they deserve our attention, and must be on our gratitude lists.
Hope your Thanksgiving was filled with warmth and laughter, good food and good friends – and maybe a good book.
Views: 32
Leave a Reply