I know, I know, I'm getting ahead of myself, but here are some thoughts on THANKSGIVING

Thanksgiving Day—A day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.
-H.L. Mencken

Thanksgiving is the most demanding holiday. Or if you can think of another, bring it forward now. You say Christmas, with its months of preparation, its infiltration into the weeks before and after on your party calendar, its slow consumption of at least one room in your house, its unapologetic ransom on your wallet, its persistent and penetrating stream of music on every station, in every room, under each tongue. Of course, Christmas is the only reasonable contender.
My blue ribbon still goes to Thanksgiving, because there is nothing compulsory about the demands of Christmas. It is demanding because we make it so; it’s just the marketing team behind every large retail company doing their job. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is a semantic trick. Short of rejecting the holiday entirely, you cannot escape the demands.
There may be those who believe Thanksgiving to be, like many other holidays, only a celebration of a specific historical event—the landmark dinner where Squanto and the Plymouth Pilgrims sat down together to celebrate the efficacy of fish-heads and corn seeds, mutually admiring the other’s moccasins or dainty heels with gold buckles. At least, that is the version I vividly remember learning when I came to fourth grade dressed as a pilgrim and the whole school packed into the cafeteria for a re-enactment feast. Gold buckles and all.
Though Thanksgiving does have a significant origination, it was maintained as a holiday not to commemorate the first Thanksgiving (luckily, since that is an awfully hazy event), but to offer current thanksgiving to God—yes, there is an intended recipient for all this gratitude—for the year’s abundance and harvest. Well, things have changed. I don’t even know what harvest means outside of metaphors and textbook explanations. My aunt, whom I often eat Thanksgiving dinner with, is fond of dinner conversations prompted by questions like, “What riches do you find in your emotional harvest this year?” Or, “Share with us the abundance you find in your life.”
Abundance has always been a relative term, but the qualifications for its use are getting larger and larger. Curse inflation—emotional, material or otherwise. My most memorable Thanksgivings are the two where the day didn’t go as planned. In one case my family ended up eating pizza and cold lima beans in a cafeteria; and in the other, the organic turkey that was so difficult to procure wasn’t ready until 9:00 pm because my mom forgot to turn on the oven. I’d like to say that I rose to the occasions and saw beyond the meal to the “true meaning of the holiday,” but I didn’t. I was annoyed, both times. I had the presence of mind to catch the irony of my irritation, but I didn’t care.
We set ourselves up, don’t we? Celebrating a day of thanks with an elaborate and extensive feast that binds us to the kitchen for days—as though we must create an appropriate abundance to be grateful for. Are we only grateful for the abundant harvests? The excess? This Thanksgiving Day seems to expose the fact that we have removed both God and gratitude from our daily lives; that our lives are so busy we must have a holiday that compels us to focus on where things come from and whose hand they come by. Or perhaps it’s just another day off work and an excuse for a big meal.