A thankful habit is a shield against pain and anger. A cushion. Something that helps us get through the days when everything looks bleak
It could — it should — be the best holiday of the year.
It has no hint of religion, region or nationalism. We all share equally in Thanksgiving. It’s the holiday in which we are all invited. Too bad it’s considered a minor one, unlike Christmas or Easter; Ramadan or Eid.
Maybe Thanksgiving should be more important, a day in which families come together to share in the bounty of the harvest.
In our increasingly urbanized lives that “bounty” comes from the grocery store and meat market, not directly from our fields and farms. Maybe we should be thankful for the men and women who provide the harvest, who raise the turkeys and grow the pumpkins.
Last weekend, how many of us stopped to give thanks for what we share? Did we give thanks for the peace we share in Canada? Did we remember to thank our shared humanity and existence?
Thanksgiving gives every person the opportunity to reflect on the good things in life, rather than the challenges and the defeats. And if you have developed what’s called “the thankful habit,” it becomes a sort of emotional bank account out of which anyone can draw when the need arises. It takes vigilance and determination to open that emotional bank account and keep adding to it.
A thankful habit is a shield against pain and anger. A cushion. Something that helps us get through the days when everything looks bleak.
I’ve written many of these thoughts before, but they bear repeating.
Each year at the end of the growing season, Canadians give thanks. It’s more than a month earlier than our American neighbours for whom Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November heralds the frantic start to Christmas shopping.
Americans like to believe they started Thanksgiving, but it actually began in pre-Reformation England when the church received one loaf of bread made of new wheat from each member of the congregation.
North American Thanksgiving did not begin with the landing of the Pilgrims in 1681. The first Thanksgiving in the New World was celebrated in what is now Newfoundland in 1578 when the initial British immigrants, brought by Sir Martin Frobisher, stopped long enough to conduct a service of thanks for their safe arrival.
That celebration was rooted in First Nations culture and practices, which taught us to feast and celebrate.
In 1879, the first Canadian national holiday was observed and in 1957 the date was set as the second Monday of October. The proclamation credited God for his blessings. Be that as it may, we are now a secular society, and God belongs in one’s heart, not in one’s laws. Yet, the blessings for which we should be thankful have not changed.
We are still a nation with a complicated identity of English and French, which gives Canada a unique perspective in North America. The community of two languages and two cultures has prevented much of the racial and religious discrimination that arises from xenophobia. Of course, there is racial unrest. But multiculturalism has made us even more tolerant of each other, despite what the fear-mongers would have everyone believe.
We have a legacy of art and culture from the length and breadth of continental Europe. We have a rich heritage of law and government from England, Scotch whisky, Irish humour, Welsh music, French food and joie de vivre. And we have the richness of Canada’s First Nations as the icing on the cake.
On top of that heritage, we have the languages, customs and cultures brought by successive waves of immigrants and refugees, all seeking a better life in Canada. They, too, deserve our thanks today, primarily for enriching our country. It’s something those of us who are Canadian by birth too often forget. Most of all, we forget that we, too, are here on suffrage, that fewer than 400 years ago, our ancestors came to this land as refugees from other cultures.
We were the second sons shipped to the colonies; the spinsters given a one-way ticket to marry trappers and farmers; the adventurers, profiteers and curiosity seekers. We were people who wanted space to breathe and people looking to escape. We all came new to this continent.
Being thankful is a small payment.