[ thanksgiving 2008 ]

This was the first Thanksgiving in my parents’ new house. Despite mom’s very vocal disappointment in the first few weeks about the house not having a formal dining room (even though their old house didn’t have one either), she didn’t say a thing about it as we were dining off of a portable plastic table in their living room. I was very proud of her for getting past the fact that they didn’t really need a formal dining space that would have only been used three times a year, at most. The food was yummy, and dad showed how little he knew about fireplaces, as he wanted to turn the gas starter on everytime he put a new log on the fire, not believing that it would catch fire otherwise. He was wrong, and at the age of sixty, learned something new that day.

I had seen on the national nightly news about a family who, in these difficult economic times where children are mourning the loss of “stuff”, made their children write out a list of the things that they were thankful for Thanksgiving. As it turned out, what the children were thankful for was family and friends, and turtles that didn’t stink. The things they were most thankful for were things that couldn’t be bought with money, and these children and their families realized that they could get through this economic downturn without new material things. So on Thanksgiving, I asked my four year old nephew what he was most thankful for. He thought for a moment, then said, “videogames”.