The holiday we call Thanksgiving in the United States is problematic for a myriad of reasons. As a public holiday, it has been celebrated nationally on and off since 1789, originally as a harvest festival. Americans also trace Thanksgiving to a 1621 celebration at the Plymouth Plantation, in Massachusetts, where the settlers held a Harvest Feast after a successful growing season. Several first person accounts by Pilgrim settlers shared stories of the exchanging of gifts and food between themselves and local tribal leaders during the Feast. Since these accounts historically have often been distorted, and even re-contextualized to minimize the nature of the relationship shared between the Pilgrims (and other European settlers) and the Indigenous Peoples of North America, it makes it difficult to fully recognize Thanksgiving as merely a holiday of celebration, which is neither benign or unencumbered by the history of its inception. Nonetheless, we gather with family and friends to share food and spirits, football and fun during a long four-day weekend where we overeat and officially enter the beginning of the “holiday season” that will ultimately end our year.

When thinking about being thankful, or thankfulness, we must pause to actually reflect on the lives we are living, the people we have in our lives, and the space in which we live those lives. We must take a moment to do some introspection while at the same time looking around at the world in which we live and how we position ourselves within that world. In those moments we must recognize that there is always something for which we can be thankful. The magnitude of the difficulties some people are experiencing in these troubled times is far beyond even the imaginations of other people and yet, even in the depths of despair one must always be encouraged to look up and recognize some thing, a person, a memory, a moment or some small act of kindness for which we can be thankful.

Taking the time to self-reflect and to recognize you have life and breath is humbling. Most of us have so much more to be thankful for than just our own lives. We have the lives of others we love and who love us in return to be thankful for and some of us have the lives of those who have profoundly affected us to be thankful for even if they are no longer here with us. If nothing else, we can be thankful that we have another opportunity to make the changes in our own lives and those around us that will increase our ability to be more thankful tomorrow than we are today. There are tremendous medicinal properties in the Act of Being Thankful.

“When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light,
for your life, for your strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you
see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.”
Tecumseh

#HappyGivingThanksDay