G-TUDE

It's the most wonderful time of the year......  that's the line from the song.  It's reference is to Christmas.  It would seem though any more that Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas all sort of slide into a quasi combined season - much like the suburbs of Chicago all blur into the city.

I'm not much into buying gifts, trick or treating or even decorating for Christmas.  Thankfully I am married to Father Christmas who loves all of the above and takes care of it all! I do though love and cherish what the holidays produce - a different pace, a different focus.  We as humans need external things to remind us, slam into us from time to time to help change our focus off ourselves onto something greater than us.  I think the holiday season offers that opportunity, that is if we take it.  If I take it.

Ever since I was a young kid, Thanksgiving has been far and wide my favorite holiday [read A November Sky blog post from 10/31/2010].  Beauty comes in so many forms and gets showcased in all sorts of ways.  November in the Midwest, though stark and bare by Thanksgiving, is a great picture of the simplicity that we should all strive to create in our lives.  Life is simple.  We though make it more complicated than need be.  We get sucked into culture and pace and mindset far too easily.

Maybe that's why Thanksgiving has always resonated deep inside me.  It speaks to the scraped back, toned down, priorities realigned, really important things that are the foundations to joy - acknowledgement of gratefulness for people, basic needs, and something bigger than us that sustains life [both nature and humanity].

I don't want to just think about such things on one day a year.  I somehow want that spirit of living deeply entrenched in how I operate.  I want to be deliberate.

  I want to savor daily.  I want to cast aside the non-essentials.

  I want to acknowledge the constant presence of a God of all of creation. 

Thanksgiving might also be one of my favorite holidays because of fond memories, my personality bent coupled with my deep despising dislike for excess anything like decorations, gifts, and have to's.   Thanksgiving as a word is just simply the act of giving thanks.  It's done in all kinds of way, one of which is a celebration of divine goodness - Thanksgiving Day.

Whether you follow traditions of food, words, prayers, travelling, family or thoughts, Thanksgiving is a quiet and unadulterated way to foster gratefulness and simplicity into our lives.  May Thanksgiving Day lead me into a year of grateful and purposed cultivation for a bigger spirit of thanksgiving that alters all the other days of the year.