Thanksgiving Leftover

As holidays go, Thanksgiving is fast becoming a cultural afterthought. It's a holiday that feels as if it sneaks up on us even though it happens at roughly the same time every year.

Modern Thanksgiving has been associated with many things other than what it was initially intended: football, large dysfunctional family gatherings and hectic long-distance travel. A meal that takes a full day to prepare with a virtual army of cooks, is consumed in about twenty minutes and is followed by three hours of regret.

Canadian Thanksgiving lacks the caché of it's partner to the south largely because the two events do not coincide. American Thanksgiving has also been tagged as the launching pad for the Christmas shopping season.

Thanksgiving is not necessarily celebrated as a religious occasion, although most meals begin with someone insisting on a rarely used grace. In Canada, Thanksgiving is a tradition drawn from European harvest festivals, although the Parliamentary wording still includes a very specific reference to God.

Living in a world where you can get strawberries and corn year round, it's hard for us to relate to the notion of a single harvest. This is unfortunate on a number of levels. The disconnect between daily life and the source of our food grows greater by the year. We simply expect that groceries to be on the shelves when we go to the supermarket. If our stores suddenly ran out of fruits or vegetables in the middle of winter we would either panic or demand a public inquiry.

The reality is, we take much of the abundance of our society for granted. We bitch and moan when bad weather effects the cost of coffee or oranges, but we don't stop to think about those whose very survival depended upon those harvests. For many, a poor harvest has far more devastating consequences.

The truth of the matter is, gratitude for our blessings should extend far beyond one single symbolic meal. We are blessed with living among the richest, safest, healthiest, most technologically advanced societies on the planet. A society that also consumes a disproportionately large amount of the same planet's resources.

But we know all this, don't we? Which is why part of our Thanksgiving experience is not so much gratitude as guilt. Thanksgiving is an almost embarrassing celebration of excess. Too much food, too much wine, too much, too much.

Perhaps the one thing we can be truly thankful for is our capacity to change. Every time we give thanks, either to God or as an act of grace in any form, we must also acknowledge that our greatest gifts are our actions, our voices and our attitudes. Even the simplest choice of a consumer can produce tremendous implications for our global economy.

What would the world look like a year from now if we went a step beyond our thankfulness and change our consumptive ways? To share a portion of that embarrassment of wealth with those who live with a heartbreaking lack of nourishment, opportunity and hope.

It's not about guilt.
It's not about doing something we should do.
It's about having the freedom and power to change things simply because we can.

That's something to be thankful for.