Today’s guest post comes from my Aunt Ruth! She and I are both overjoyed that our entire family will be together on Thursday, and then again the day after Christmas. It almost never works out that we get everyone there for both, so we are very excited!!  Here are a few thoughts on what seems to be a forgotten holiday.

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It’s the week of Thanksgiving and everywhere you look are sights and sounds of the season. . . but it’s not Thanksgiving, it’s Christmas!  It’s a surreal season between Halloween and Thanksgiving, where turkeys mingle happily with reindeer (who knows if they even like each other?) and the Halloween candy is not even on clearance before Christmas trees are lining the aisles at Target!

Lost somewhere between all the lights and the jingle bells, and the shopping and the stress, is a lovely little holiday–one of my favorites–where we take time not to acquire, or to admire what we have acquired, but to offer thanks for all the goodness in our lives.  Even though the world has already moved on to Christmas, I urge you to hold fast to Thanksgiving!!

Thanksgiving in our family is always a time for tradition.  Even though we have taken another path for our Christmas get togethers (think Christmas around the world. . . on crack!), when we gather for Thanksgiving, there are Powers traditions that we remember and uphold.  And certain things that have to be on the table: the turkey of course, in any variation of fried, roasted, baked or brined, the sweet potato casserole (which we always had to call pecan surprise because of Jason’s aversion to all things sweet potato), mashed potatoes and rolls for Sarah, and pumpkin pie for Matthew.  And of course, the holiday is not complete without “the cake”– a chocolate cake with caramel icing that my grandmother used to make.  Around our Thanksgiving table there will be stories told and retold, and afterwards there will be time to spend with those we don’t see as often as we’d like, and thankfulness for stretchy pants!

I am a retired teacher, and one of the books I always read with my 5^th graders is Out of the Dust, a fictionalized journal of a 12 year old girl set in the dust bowl of Oklahoma during the 1930’s.  Billie Jo, the principal character of the story, endures unimaginable hardships including devastating dust storms, drought, and a fire that kills her mother and unborn brother. She burns her hands in the fire and loses, for a time, the one thing that brings her joy: playing the piano.  While a sad tale, the thing that makes the book a keeper for me is Billie Jo’s journal entry on Thanksgiving Day in 1934, where she is able, in the midst of tragedy and despair, to list two pages of things that she is thankful for.  We should all be so able to see with the eyes of thankfulness!

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So, when we gather on Thursday, there will be much laughter, there will be turkey, there will be football, there will be stretchy pants, and there will be an extra helping of thankfulness!  And while more than one of us will be decorating a tree next weekend, and more than one of us will be coerced into very late-night or very early morning Christmas shopping with Sarah, Thanksgiving will be a day of remembering the blessings of all that has passed and all that is coming…and being thankful.  We wish the same for you and your family!

{Aunt Ruth and me at “Christmas Around the World” a few years ago…Can you guess which country it was?}

What’s your favorite Thanksgiving tradition?