Are You Thankful After Thanksgiving, or Just for the Day?
It’s been a little while since Thanksgiving, that wonderful day of warm feelings and deep gratitude. After the buzz wears off and the leftovers are all gone, I’m left wondering: Was that gratitude we felt on that day real, or just a one-off sugar rush from the pies and carbs?
In a world of seemingly endless chaos, election results that unnerve our spirits (looking at you, NYC), and stories of corruption that honestly enrage me—these are the things that should remind us that giving thanks isn’t a holiday checkbox.
Gratitude is the gift we must carry into the winter of our discontent, and that winter always comes. I promise you that.
“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing, and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” —G. K. Chesterton
Flash back to the Pilgrims, those weary people who sailed the Mayflower in 1620 with hearts fueled by faith over fear. Half of them perished that first Plymouth winter—scurvy gnawing at them and starvation’s shadow hanging nearby. Yet by fall 1621, with Wampanoag wisdom from Squanto lighting the way, the pilgrims managed a proper harvest.
They had food. Sweet, good food. The one thing they truly needed in this strange place. Abraham Lincoln brought that spirit center stage in 1863 during the darkness of the Civil War. Lincoln points out that even in this tragic war, the United States was growing. Children are being born…
Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
Things are bad, yes, but look at what is clearly so good. We mourn the loss of life, so why not rejoice for all that is new?
The Thanksgiving We Don’t Talk About
Now, look to Florida in the year 1565, many years before Plymouth. The air is thick and swampy, and 800 exhausted Spanish Catholics have staggered onto the shore of a place we know as St. Augustine. Their leader, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, isn’t thinking about holiday traditions because survival is top of mind. French warships are nearby… Storms nearly killed them all… Food is questionable… Morale is at rock bottom.
Before the Catholics build fences or start preparing cannon fortifications, they stop and say “thank you.” Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales celebrated Mass to give thanks for their lives, and then they sat with the Timucua people—Native Americans who knew the land far better than they did—for a rough, improvised feast. This ragtag mix of Catholics and Indigenous people shared food together and enjoyed a fragile peace.
Nobody called it “Thanksgiving.” It was just a warm moment where human beings who had every reason to be fearful and angry chose gratitude instead.
Yes, you can choose it. Despite!
My wish is that my descendants don’t stop at carrying on the traditions about turkey on Thanksgiving and a specific kind of tree at Christmas, though I do love those things. I want them to carry on the meaning behind those things, and more importantly, make them a feature of their lives year-round, through good times and bad. Lord knows there will be plenty of each.
Gratitude is your spiritual lantern in the deep freeze, and when it’s the deepest, the heart and mind both yearn to know where the good things came from.
Don’t just thank God, seek to know God.
C.S. Lewis wrote in one of his letters that, “Gratitude exclaims…‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, “What must be the quality of that Being (God) whose far-off and momentary coruscations (flashes of light) are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.”
Put simply: If you have a feast and a light in the room which allows you to see all that amazing food, maybe look to the Source of the light…