Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!  I have fallen behind with my posts.  Actually, I have posts ready to go but am suddenly having trouble figuring out how to add photos and my daughters (who so far are the only people who regularly read my posts anyway - I still don't know how this all works) tell me the photos really add to my posts.  

But it's Thanksgiving, my favourite American holiday, and even though when I first lived in the USA I didn't understand what it was about, and my friends at the time didn't seem to be able to articulate the significance of it, I eventually understood it to be about nothing more complicated than being together with friends and family, eating good food and taking a moment to be thankful - always a good practice, I find, even if it's only once a year.

It's also the one holiday that, try as they might, the media and advertisers and other corporate marauders have not managed to make commercial in any significant way and that gives me such faith in the power of simple human traditions.

We have had Thanksgiving dinners here in Tasmania before.  While I don't generally push our American traditions on my family here, and it's disconcerting to see Halloween becoming a ridiculous commercial farce that has people scrambling to imitate what they see on American TV without having grown up with the cultural reference point that makes it all make sense, Thanksgiving is special enough to make the cut.  And since we're a day ahead here, we get to have our dinner on the Friday which makes more sense to my Tasmanian family.  It also means we get to do what I think is one of the most magical things about this occasion, and that is sit down to a meal that thousands of people all over the USA (and other pockets of the world) are all doing at the same time.  Like a gratitude tsunami...

Thanks for listening....
and Happy Thanksgiving today and every day!