Next post
Thanksgiving is the most American of our holidays. Which may explain why your Leftwing relatives can’t help but to denounce and mock everyone who disagrees while helping themselves to more turkey and a second serving of pumpkin pie.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!
~~Shakespeare King Lear
Your cousin, the sixth-year undergrad in Anger Studies with pink hair, opines around a mouthful of creamed corn that female wypipo who vote GOP are racist. Don’t risk your digestion. And certainly don’t risk your great grandma’s china, no matter how satisfying it would be to bounce it off your cousin’s head. Smile and ask for another helping of stuffing.
The other guests at the table, the ones who were, a moment before, planning a hasty retreat from the table, will sigh in relief and gratitude.
There should be those times in our lives when we can leave politics aside. When we can relax with our family and friends and be strengthen our bonds over celebration of small things. The birth of a new family member, a new job, a youngster starting music lessons, a teenager’s new driver’s license. We can talk books and movies and sports. Time to pass old memories of long past relatives down to our children. We can maintain old traditions and start new ones.
Be grateful for the good things and love the family we have. And for one day, we can set politics aside.
From my home to yours, may the blessings of God and the peace of Thanksgiving be yours.
.
.
.
.
featured image original illustration by Darleen Click
GWB says: I go a bit the other way: at Thanksgiving we talk about how incredible our nation is and how blessed we are by our God to have lived here. If you want to argue that America is not a great nation, or that we are not blessed by a great God in living here, then you’re not really going to enjoy sitting at my table. Because we WILL “acknowledg[e] with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God” and we WILL thank Him, “that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be”. At my house, we will ALWAYS offer up “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens” and “humbly offer[] our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to […] render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed.”
Quotes taken from Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789 and Lincoln’s Proclamation of Thanksgiving in 1861.
GWB says: One more, from Adams’ proclamation in 1798, more in line with your post:
That it be made the subject of particular and earnest supplication, […] that the American people may be united in those bonds of amity and mutual confidence, and inspired with that vigor and fortitude by which they have in times past been so highly distinguished, and by which they have obtained such invaluable advantages
2 Comments