What happened to Thanksgiving? Giving Thanks in 6 Easy Steps

 

After witnessing scenes of Black Friday shoppers literally trampling others to get the best deal, it looks like there’s a slow movement away from the notion that Thanksgiving is only a holiday shortcut to the really important Christmas gift season. There doesn’t seem to be a logical explanation as to how Thanksgiving became such a prelude to greed and gifts-driven holiday as opposed to the food and thanks-driven one that we started out with when the Pilgrims first celebrated Thanksgiving.

 One reason may be that we are not a rural society, where farmer’s almanacs and the harvest schedule even comes into play. Another is that we have grown into a secular society that doesn’t easily incorporate holidays with innately religious overtones. Thus, we have blended societies wants and needs in a 21^st Century world with a holiday that is basically stuck in the 17^th Century. That is where we’re at these days with Thanksgiving.

 In this world we live in, full of hustle and high-tech, here are a few suggestions to bring the original intent of the Thanksgiving holiday into focus. As we kick off the holiday season, it seems appropriate to reflect and give thanks for all that we have in our daily lives. Here are six steps to bringing us back to the Thanksgiving holiday that was intended:

 

1.·       Tuesday, December 1^st is Giving Tuesday. At #GivingTuesday, charities, families, businesses, community centers and schools will work together to spread the word about Giving Tuesday. The idea is to donate, to celebrate generosity and the spirit of giving, and to give to a charity of your choice either your time or your money or both.

2.·         FairTrade: On Cyber Monday, and during the Christmas giving season, look online for the items that are marked Fair Trade. Almost all large churches and many small businesses honor and promote Fair Trade items.

3.·         Give thanks for all you have in your own life. Your own friends and family, and the bounty we share is in direct contrast with others in our communities and neighborhoods and schools that don’t have food security, a safe place to live, a roof over their heads, or a job.

4 ·         As Americans, we should give thanks each day for America’s Bounty. Our harvest, our workers, our military which is many times larger than any other standing army on the planet, and our ingenuity and hopeful “Can-do” attitude that has always been a part of the American Dream.

5 ·         Finally, we are a Spiritually wealthy country, with many diverse religious backgrounds that should be able to live in harmony and worship freely, as that is a core value in our Constitution.

·6          Our bounty includes the Age of Information that we live in, that enables us to live in a Global Village, surrounded by knowledge, which should be a positive thing.

 

 

In the end, if we can give thanks for simple things like our health and the pleasures of being with family and friends, that may counter all the Black Friday trends that our nation has seen and will hopefully fade away in time. To help those less fortunate, to remember to give thanks for who we are; to learn to let go, and just to Give Thanks one day out of the year, that remains the best part of the Thanksgiving Holiday.

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The Blurbles

 

 

As a whole, we are a society that reminds me of the scene from A Coalminer’s Daughter. At one point, Spacek/Loretta Lynn has a quiet nervous breakdown on stage in front of thousands of her fans. But she is depicted as such a big-hearted human being, so honest and vulnerable, that the conversation seemed to be a natural and beautiful thing.

She says to the hushed crowd, “Patsy used to say to me: ‘Little girl, you got to run your own life…But now my life’s running me...” She needed to stop and get off.  That is the sum of it. How often do we think that our lives are veering off course?

The other day on Social Media, one of the darlings of Instagram, Essena O’Neill, pulled the plug on her hamster wheel and jumped off.  O’Neill admitted that the hundreds of photos and supposedly spontaneous pictures were only achieved after hours of posing and dieting and suffering to reach perfection. She wanted no more of it, and decided to pull the plug.

These honest moments are things we can identify with. They are the things that stick with us. As a movie lover, I remember a scene from “Beyond Borders” with one of my favorite actors, Clive Owen, where he went into a packed ballroom of wealthy donors sitting through a Non-Profit event-one of those “Rubber-chicken circuit” dinners that politicians and the like often frequent.

 

Lab Rats of Madison Avenue

Owen breaks up the evening by walking up to the microphone and calling out the hypocrisy while dropping F-bombs left and right. I’ve often wondered if anyone has ever had the courage to do something like that in reality.  I think we all feel the need at times to just strip away the curtain and call out the hypocrisy and banality that we deal with every day. We sometimes feel like Lab Rats for Madison Avenue, especially as those of us chained to a desk see the world floating by through ads and e-mails.

It’s now a given that we, as writers, have about 2 to 3 seconds to capture your attention before you swipe right and move on to the next new thing. That’s why we feel like Lab Rats, the victims of a Madison Avenue Experiment gone dangerously wrong… McCluhan said it best, ‘The Word is the Blurb’.

The Word is the Blurb = The Blurb Blog

 That’s one of the reasons I decided to create “The Blurb Blog”. The Blurb Blog seeks to address not a single iota of these deep-rooted societal problems. However, in simply calling attention to the problem, we can begin to focus on those things which matter to us.

If only for a few minutes during the day, we may be able to take a breather from our duties and simply remember to just “be”. To be human, to be fallible, to be funny, to be sentimental and all those other things that make us who we are-those are the reasons to read “The Blurb Blog”.