Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

(Or should I say, Happy American Chuseok! 😉)

Hopefully, if you’re in charge of Thanksgiving dinner, you’ve got everything ready to go for tonight. If you’re still figuring things out (yikes!), here’s a menu to help. Otherwise, hopefully you’re just going to order food and let someone else take care of it.

Or maybe you’re a reluctant guest for the obligatory family get-together. Anyone would have a hard time looking forward to making awkward polite conversation with people they see once a year. Most people would rather be comfortably at home in their sweats watching tv. (I’m raising my hand. How about you?) It’s a bit different from how I grew up.

Thanksgiving Was A Little Different for Us

My family always had an easy peazy Thanksgiving meal when I was a kid. We’re talking Stove Top and gravy from a can. The most time consuming thing was the turkey.

My parents would work most of the day, which many people do, especially immigrants. So my sister and I had to get dinner started. It wasn’t exactly the Norman Rockwell picture of multiple generations gathering around a table full of food that the matriarch spent all day to put together. Nope, no cornucopia on our table. We needed the space for kimchi and japchae!

But you know what? This untraditional situation had the unintended result of forcing us to focus on what was really important. And that wasn’t the food!

It was us, as a family, getting together at the table at the same time and sharing a meal, and more importantly, time together.

It’s so easy, this time of year, to get caught up in what to cook, what to buy, and even what to wear. And so easy to forget the point of the holiday.

Cultivating Thankfulness

Yes, Thanksgiving has Puritanical roots, and let’s not even get started on the cultural genocide of Native Americans. But today is about gratitude not history. So setting those atrocities aside for just a moment….

Hasn’t Thanksgiving always been about giving thanks? I mean, it’s in the name! Granted it was for a good harvest, but still it’s giving thanks.

Of course, every day should be a day for cultivating thankfulness but that’s really easier said than done. We all know this.

It’s just human nature to take things for granted.

But this is, basically, the one day where you stop and take a moment to appreciate what you’ve got in your life, especially the people.

Thanksgiving is a time of having a grateful heart for all that we have and not all that we would like to have. (I know, it’s ironic that it’s right before the busiest shopping time of the year.)

It’s a time of recognizing what’s most important. That is, relationships. Friends and family are what really makes us feel rich, right? So today is about giving to those who mean the most to us. It could be to those around a shared dinner table or those at a soup kitchen. But never does giving and/or sharing feel so fulfilling as on this day. So maybe the holiday should really be called “Givingthanks Day.”

It doesn’t matter if you cook all day or it’s just any other day’s meal. It doesn’t matter if you have turkey or lasagna (I did that one year per request). And it doesn’t matter if it’s you and twenty of your relatives or just you and your cat.

And even though I’ll be forced to wear formal clothes when I’d prefer to wear my eatin’ pants….

Today we give thanks for it all.

That’s what I want to impart on my kid like it was on to me….Hm, maybe I should have him make dinner like I had to!

Happy Givingthanks! 😉