All too often Thanksgiving can feel like a pit stop on in the holiday highway starting at Halloween and ending at New Year’s.   The Christmas decorations are up before we slice the pumpkin pie and people are waiting in line for Black Friday sales before the turkey as settled in their bellies.  So let’s take a moment to look at Thanksgivings past and some of the things we can be grateful for.

Not having to kill and clean our own turkeys for the Thanksgiving feast.  The turkey may be the king of Thanksgiving, but uneasy lies the head that wears that crown.  Finding a bird in a hermetically sealed bag that does not share a likeness to an actual living creature can be a great relief for those preparing their Thanksgiving feats.  The comparison of the bird to the children adds a nice Hansel and Gretel twist to this Thanksgiving photo from the Omaha Daily Bee.

When there are too many cooks in the kitchen or when you have some time to relax, it’s nice to have a little entertainment whether it be the Thanksgiving parade or a good football game.  Not everybody agrees that football is a fitting Thanksgiving activity.

“When our Puritan fathers thought it wise and well to give thanks to God for the benefits showered upon them little did they think that in after years this, their day of greatest worship to the Creator of every good and perfect thing, would be turned into a day for the purpose of distributing football trophies among the youths whose muscle was their religion and whose halfback was their God.” San Francisco Call November 28, 1895.

We might not enjoy the hours of traffic and flight delays required to get to and from our Thanksgiving destinations, but we can be assured that as we sit in traffic, snug in our cars listening to music and reading books, that we are traveling in ease and comfort compared to holiday travelers 100 years ago.

Whether you serve a turkey you harvested yourself from the nearby foothills or a soy-based turkey substitute, the fundamentals of Thanksgiving remain the same.  We are given one day to gather together with the people we care about and take a moment to appreciate everything that life has to offer.  That is something to be thankful for.  Happy Thanksgiving!