So Thankful

With Thanksgiving just barely a week away, it has given me a lot of time to reflect on what is important to me and about how grateful I am that I have been so blessed. I have a wonderful (most of the time!) family, a cozy home and I almost always have food to put on the table. :-) There are so many others who have nothing, next to nothing, or sooooooo much that they feel no reason to be thankful. I am a firm believer that all things we have are from God and He has every right to take anything and everything back that He once saw fit to give us. Anybody heard of Job?

With that being said, I am eager about Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays. It's a shame that Thanksgiving is often overlooked as merely "Turkey Day" where families get together and gorge themselves on the smorgasbord laid out before them, instead of taking advantage of the reason for the holiday: giving thanks to God for the smorgasbord laid out before them. Oh, I guess it would be politically incorrect to thank God in public, so I imagine that is the reason why so many stores and companies simply skip right from Halloween to Christmas (or "X-mas" or "Season" or "Holiday", since the word "CHRISTmas" has obviously become politically incorrect as well). I guess most people feel that there is no reason to include God in any of these holidays, even though He is the very reason for them. But I still love Thanksgiving...it reminds me that I have what I have because God chose to give it to me, and for that I am eternally grateful. I even love the turkey and the stuffing, the green bean casserole and the cranberries, the mashed potatoes and the sweet potatoes....and who doesn't love the pumpkin pie? As a child, I loved the fact that my relatives (who lived 15 minutes away, yet only showed up at Thanksgiving to eat the "free" turkey at our house) would come over, even though my uncle would often show up in a dress and high heels. It was still fun and I look back fondly at the memories of playing hide and seek with my two cousins, while one of my cousins and I would always "gang up" on the other one and hide in locations that we KNEW she would never find us (outside the boundaries we had set for the game.) Then, instead of coming out and finishing the game, my other cousin and I would stay in our hiding spot and just play. And we would laugh at Uncle Ricky's dress, which didn't quite zip all the way up. Fun times. This year I have even more to be thankful for and I still look forward to Thanksgiving with the same childlike "fun" that I had all those years ago.