The best Thanksgiving ever!

I heard this expression “Have Your Best Thanksgiving Ever!” a few days ago on a TV ad. I think the ad was suggesting that if you take the family out to eat at this certain restaurant, you will be served the greatest food with the greatest service, and you will experience your best Thanksgiving ever. Now I am going to guarantee you that I won’t be taking the family out there for Thanksgiving, if I can find any other alternative. It doesn’t at all fi t my idea of what a Thanksgiving observance should be.

Not that I would have anything against eating there sometime, I’m just not going there with the idea of having the best Thanksgiving ever!

Actually it has never occurred to me to try to have the best Thanksgiving ever! How would you rate a Thanksgiving? Would you say it is a great Thanksgiving because the food is great? The turkey is just right? My team wins the football game? We had the best turnout ever for the family gathering? The kids all behaved perfectly at the table? The best deals ever are out there for the getting when the day turns into a shopping spree? How do you rate something like a Thanksgiving?

I tend not to rate one in relation to another. It is like your love for your grandchildren. I love my grandchildren very much, and Idon’t try to decide which of them I love the most. Each of my grandchildren is the best. And it is OK if other grandparents have their grandchildren who are the best. To me, Thanksgiving is the best, and Christmas is the best, and Easter is the best, and that is as far as I go to rate them.

As I have observed life across quite a few years, there are always things happening which take the thrill out of events which we observe year by year.

Special days, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, are very much attached to our family ties, and as the years pass, some of the family members who have always been a rich part of the special days come to be no longer with us. My Grandma Ellen Nichols, who I loved greatly, passed away in 1954 when I was 14 years old. It was at her house that I first came to love the Thanksgiving season, and she taught us to be thankful, not just to try to have the best Thanksgiving ever! Grandma Ellen wasn’t with us from 1954 on, but she had given us Thanksgivings to treasure, and reminders of blessings to appreciate.

So although Thanksgiving is not the same without her, it doesn’t ruin Thanksgiving that she can’t be with us now, Thanksgivings remind us of cherished ties and of continuing blessings, and I treasure my Grandma and Granddad at Thanksgiving time. Now my parents are both deceased as well, and Thanksgiving and Christmas is not the same without them, but I treasure them at Thanksgiving time and am reminded of the continuing blessings we have shared and still share.

Sometimes Thanksgiving Day is referred to as Turkey Day. Sometimes it is seen as a day to “party!” I like to think of Thanksgiving as festival, as tied to the harvest, as tied to the land, as tied to the larger family, as tied to the spiritual ideals by which we live our lives.

So, it really doesn’t matter that much how perfectly the day goes, whether we get to be just where we want to be, whether or not the football game goes our way, whether the pie is pumpkin or sweet potato or pecan or apple, whether we have turkey or ham or chicken. Actually, in the old days our family never had turkey for Thanksgiving. Nobody that I knew had any turkeys. We had chickens, so we had fried chicken for Thanksgiving, and dressing, and giblet gravy, and sweet corn and green peas and pumpkin pie! Anyway, Thanksgiving was never Turkey Day to us, and we had no TV for watching football, andthere were no phones to talk on or to play with, and our country was at war with Japan and Germany.

But it was Thanksgiving, and we were counting our blessings, such as they were.

I have the idea that Thanksgiving is not so much a time to try to have fine experiences of eating or consuming or playing, or getting everything to go so perfectly that we see the day as the best Thanksgiving ever. Rather, Thanksgiving is a time to focus on appreciating the blessings we have, a time to feel blessed, as we truly are blessed. One of the problems of living in a wealthy society is that we may come to take things for granted.

How sad it is when people are richly, richly blessed, but they don’t feel blessed, and have forgotten how to appreciate blessings and how to express heartfelt appreciation. How much better to be moderately blessed, and to know how to feel blessed and how to appreciate our blessings! To me, that makes for the best Thanksgiving!

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.