I heard an interesting program on the radio yesterday. It started by citing a poll which asked people, “If you were offered a thousand dollars to forgo the traditional Thanksgiving celebration, would you do it?” The majority of those asked stated they would pass on the money because their traditional celebration with family is too important to them.
That’s a good answer: family should be more important than money. But in many cases Thanksgiving seems to have gone the way of most “traditional” holidays: especially this year.
With social and political issues causing deep rifts in families and social groups, can your gathering be kept civil and respectful of one another? Can you be thankful for their presence in your life and at your table?
Every year I hear more people moaning about the amount of work and expense they had to put into preparing The Feast and cleaning up after. If these are things you dread as it approaches and complain about afterward, can you be truly thankful for any of it?
Has this holiday lost its meaning? Do you spend more than 23 seconds just before you eat being thankful for anything, or is it all about a long weekend, gluttony, football, and a big party?
If you are celebrating Thanksgiving, make it about being thankful. If you cannot be thankful for what you have, where you are in life, and for your family and friends; you might as well skip the whole thing, or tell the gang, “We’re going out for dinner – and it’s Dutch treat.”
This morning I celebrate a new personal best. It could be measured in a number of ways. Today marks 21,915 days (including leap year days) of life. Or I could say I’m celebrating 20 years of life — for the third time around. Or I could say I’ve broken into the realm of 
Each day in our life is important and it’s a shame that we waste so many of them. I’m guilty too, we all are. Occasionally I read about some extraordinary person who claims to live every day to its fullest, wasting nothing. The most successful people around claim to wring the most out of every hour.
Regrets do serve a purpose. When we regret having done something, we learn from it so we can move on and do better. It’s when we decide to pitch a tent in those regrets and live there that they become destructive.
I have always said that a serious writer needs a work space of one’s own in which to write. For one thing you need a place that is out of the main flow of family life where distractions abound. For another, if you work on the dining room table, you are always having to pack up your stuff and move out of the way. This is not much of an issue if you only write short pieces and have little in the way of notes to keep up with. But if you write longer or complex pieces – or a novel – you use a good bit of material you must pack away every time you pack off.
I figured I’d back the truck in to my loading dock, roll the wood splitter out onto the dock, split the wood as it came off the truck and stack it. Since it’s green wood, I won’t be able to burn it this year, it needs to season first. I’ll stack it on the far end of the “ready to use” wood stack and hope we don’t burn through the whole stack this winter.
