Tomorrow is the day we will officially celebrate Thanksgiving and for the last decade or so, I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving with my husband, family and friends, but growing up – my parents were British and they didn’t make a big deal out of the Thanksgiving holiday. For my grandmother’s part, she believed that it was a nice enough holiday but that we should be thankful all year long and not just on one particular day.
Over the last decade, I’ve developed a few of my own Thanksgiving traditions and embraced the traditions of my husband’s families. For their part, the holiday involves bringing the whole family together around a rich variety of foods that everyone takes part in preparing. We laugh, we chat and we just enjoy being together.
My traditions include writing personal notes to the people attending – expressing to them what I am thankful for both in general and in specific to each of them. My daughter is helping me write the notes this year. We spent last week doing nice things for her Kindergarten teacher, including creating a tree of thanks for her teacher with each student expressing what they are thankful for on a leaf. We prepared some a chocolate cake dessert with strawberries and drizzles of white and dark chocolate on it. We also made pies and more.
This morning, I continued my Thanksgiving tradition by swinging over to a Starbuck’s, picking up a mocha and then paying it back – I paid for the people in the car behind me and the car behind that one in order to express my thanks to my fellow man – stranger or not – and to share the bounty of the year. This afternoon, my daughter and I will be preparing pies for our neighbors so we can drop those off for their Thanksgiving feast. She chose banana cream and coconut cream.
These are the little ways that we demonstrate our thanks to the people we know and to those that we don’t. I believe in being thankful on every level of our lives and to celebrate the brotherhood of man whether we know them or not.
Over the weekend, we’ll be visiting an angel tree to select an angel to shop for in the course of our shopping and we plan to donate 10% of our shopping budget to the Red Cross. While these traditions have grown for me over the years and we’ve added to them and will likely continue to add to them. This is our way of saying thank you.
How do you and your spouse celebrate Thanksgiving?
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