Thursday, November 25

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a national holiday celebrated on various dates in the United States, Canada, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Liberia. It began as a day of giving thanks and sacrifice for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year. 

Similarly named festival holidays occur in Germany and Japan. Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday of October in Canada and on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States and around the same part of the year in other places. 

Although Thanksgiving has historical roots in religious and cultural traditions, it has long been celebrated as a secular holiday as well.  SOURCE:  Wikipedia

AUTHOR'S NOTE:  I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia and every Thanksgiving and every Christmas we would pack up the car and my father would drive the family down to Winston-Salem, NC to spend the holiday with my grandfather.  The Thanksgiving table was just like in the photograph above...  these were obviously pleasant memories.

After I got married, we still celebrated Thanksgiving with a large meal and always a turkey, but the amount of food was not as much as I recall having in NC...  although, those could just be a child's memory.  

At 74 years of age, I am still very much thankful for all that I have and while I don't just wait for Thanksgiving to roll around to celebrate my gratitude, I quietly celebrate it every day.

I am also mindful of the millions of people, especially in the United States who do not have the financial means to celebrate Thanksgiving in the same way that the rest of us celebrate it, but they celebrate it nonetheless with their limited abilities.

It is not the wealthy that make Thanksgiving memorable...
It is not the amount of food that makes Thanksgiving memorable...
It is not being with family that makes Thanksgiving memorable...

It is the concept that you are THANKFUL for all that you have regardless of how much or how little that is...


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