Happy ThanChristmas!
Here in the US, we’re getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving – a time when the early Settlers were so thankful for the bountiful harvest they received with the help of the Native Americans that they gathered together and shared their food and friendship with each other. Much thanks was shared for it meant that lives were saved and many hardships for the upcoming winter were averted. It meant they would survive. And they were thankful.
But that was a couple hundred years ago, and My! – How things have changed! Now, instead of a gathering of friends and family giving thanks for each other and for the bounty in our lives and on our tables, we gather around the television or the gaming console, doing our best to ignore the family and friends with whom we’re supposed to be reconnecting. If we open a newspaper or watch the news, it is only to find the mass media already well into their practiced script bemoaning how bad the holiday shopping season is likely to be and what that means for the stores and our consumerist economy! We are overwhelmed with ads for overpriced gadgets, games, toys, and all kinds of other non-essential things, brainwashed and guilt-trippped in to buying buying buying everything that little Johnny wants for Christmas.
Oh wait! This is supposed to be about Thanksgiving, isn’t it? Yes, you know- the thoughts and feeling of appreciation for all that we have. The sharing of food and friendship with our fellow humans. Time to reconnect to mankind and to nature, a celebration of a good harvest and a preparation for the cold winter ahead. Yeah, that mushy human-connection stuff.
It’s difficult to remember this when our culture has catapulted right over one of the few remaining holidays of substance and landed in the middle of another holiday that has had its true meaning thoroughly wrestled from the hearts, lives, and reflections of the average person. Without going into a tirade about that, and accepting the holiday for the shallow consumerist “gimme gimme” event it has become, how can we appreciate even that aspect of the day when we leap right over the holiday that is supposed to be all about appreciating what we have and being grateful that all we need has been provided to us?
Thanksgiving is not a grandiose holiday covered in gifts and decorations and “stuff”, but it is an important one. So let’s take a moment this Thanksgiving to remember what this day is supposed to be about: Giving thanks. Let us share a humble, heart-felt, true appreciation for all that has come our way the last year – physically, emotionally and spiritually. Let us remember that we have much for which to be grateful – we are alive, our basic needs are met, and we enjoy the benefits of the work we’ve done to get us this far.
May your Thanksgiving be warm and sincere.
Namaste.
– OMM
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