Thanksgiving 2024

I used to write and post a long list of things I was thankful for each year, but I haven’t done that for a few years as it got to be an exercise in copying-and-pasting. I’m still thankful for an awful lot, but this holiday hits different anyway. Last year, Thanksgiving came less than two weeks after Mom died, and since then Dad has gone to an assisted living facility, so this is the first Thanksgiving that truly feels like it’s being spent without my parents in the world. Worse than that is the state of my country; it’s hard to summon up warm and fuzzy Thanksgiving feelings in a nation that has apparently chosen authoritarianism.

Still, it’s Thanksgiving. I hope it’s happy.

“Thanksgiving”, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

We walk on starry fields of white
   And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
   We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
   To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
   Of pleasures sweet and tender.

Our cares are bold and push their way
   Upon our thought and feeling.
They hand about us all the day,
   Our time from pleasure stealing.
So unobtrusive many a joy
   We pass by and forget it,
But worry strives to own our lives,
   And conquers if we let it.

There’s not a day in all the year
   But holds some hidden pleasure,
And looking back, joys oft appear
   To brim the past’s wide measure.
But blessings are like friends, I hold,
   Who love and labor near us.
We ought to raise our notes of praise
   While living hearts can hear us.

Full many a blessing wears the guise
   Of worry or of trouble;
Far-seeing is the soul, and wise,
   Who knows the mask is double.
But he who has the faith and strength
   To thank his God for sorrow
Has found a joy without alloy
   To gladden every morrow.

We ought to make the moments notes
   Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
The hours and days a silent phrase
   Of music we are living.
And so the theme should swell and grow
   As weeks and months pass o’er us,
And rise sublime at this good time,
   A grand Thanksgiving chorus.

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