Thanksgiving changes as you grow up. When you’re in second grade, the holiday is all about putting on the annual Thanksgiving play -- you know, the one where you’re dressed up as corn on the cob and someone else gets to play Sacagawea.
Then in sixth grade, you get to write your first big research paper -- one about the historical background of the holiday. By eighth grade, you learn that for male adults, Thanksgiving is just a day where they get fed and get to watch as much football as they want without getting called lazy.
In high school, Thanksgiving is a pretty okay holiday -- you get off of class for a few days, but you don’t see this as anything other than a teaser of what Christmas Break is all about. And by the time you’re in college, Thanksgiving is the most perfect holiday of all, because you’re able to spend it back home with the people you care most about.
It’s easy to think of holidays like we think of anything else in our lives -- egocentrically. What I mean is that we can easily think about Thanksgiving as a time that we get to come home, that we get to stuff our faces, and that we get to go shopping afterward. But what if the holiday really isn’t about us? What if the holiday was about something much bigger, much grander in the scheme of all this?
Thanksgiving isn’t just about giving thanks in the form of food. It’s about giving thanks in the form of giving. I think this is so often overlooked. It’s easy to feel like you’re on the fast track to being a good person again when you say your prayers of gratefulness or when you tell someone just how much you love them. I’m not saying you’re wrong here -- those are amazing things and you should most definitely do them on Thanksgiving. But we also have the ability to do all of those things every single morning that we wake up, and even more than that.
Thanksgiving shouldn’t just be a reminder that you care about your friends and family and you recognize just how blessed you are. It should be a call to action -- one that summons you to give all of you can in any way. Whether that’s spending the weekend after Thanksgiving playing with puppies at the animal shelter or participating in a toy drive for less fortunate children, anything at all is giving as long as its done by you. You have the ability to do so much with your time. You have the ability to make someone’s holiday season, to make a new friend, to even learn someone else’s story. The possibilities are endless, and by giving yourself, you’re getting much more than what you started with.
By giving on Thanksgiving, you actually gain. You gain confidence, you gain humility, you gain joy, and you gain appreciation. You gain all of the qualities that this entire holiday was based upon, and I think that may just be the greatest gift of all. So this Thanksgiving, I hope you give thanks. But I also hope you give.
