Why in the World Should We Celebrate Thanksgiving?

There’s sentiment in Cape May County and elsewhere to scrap tomorrow and fast forward to Black Friday. Why not? All Thanksgiving Day is good for is to have parades and grub and get ready to spend into oblivion at midnight on Friday.
If ever there was a year not to be grateful for anything, certainly this is the one. Right? Loads of folks are out of jobs, and more may be soon. Many businesses are going broke. The future looks like a tidal wave brewing. Warm weather surely means global warming will make Court House a seaside resort very shortly.
Our governor-elect will take his sweaty palm off the Bible Jan. 17 and inherit an $8 billion budget shortfall, and that’s if everything goes well. Taxes won’t go up, he vows, but somehow few of us believe anything that comes out of Trenton.
Things just are not what they used to be, they’re worse. Foreclosures are still rising. Hope is down, blood pressures are up.
Amid all of this mayhem, we have tomorrow that the Pollyannas among us say is about being thankful. Thankful for what?
How on earth can we sit down to dinner tomorrow and chow down on turkey and all the fixings, end up with pain from our gluttony, and say we are thankful? There just isn’t any reason to be thankful for anything. Too much evil has stolen the good.
Tragedy has befallen many of our good friends this year. Loved ones were taken far too soon. There is rampant illness among children. Old folks grasp for hope in their golden years, and find precious little. Many are trying to get a grip on heading into the flu season. Because of all this, who has time for this thankful business?
Many consider themselves “poor” when they have owned the same car for eight years, have one television, a landline telephone phone, 15-year-old refrigerator, without and ice maker, and a vintage gas stove.
Many of those same folks like to complain about taxes, the neighbor’s dog, waiting too long in the supermarket to check out, and immigrants who come to America and don’t speak English. To them, everything is wrong, nothing is right.
For every one who feels the same way about those things, Thanksgiving is just another day without mail delivery, an inconvenience in an endless string of complaints.
When I think about Thanksgiving, I remember visiting a Philippine village where fortunate families earned $45 a year and considered themselves “rich” if they owned a water buffalo.
I think of veterans and cancer patients who lost limbs and eyesight, but not their lives, who are deeply grateful for each day they see the sun rise.
I think of children who visit Helen L. Diller Vacation Home for Blind Children in Avalon each summer, who “see” the ocean and beach for the first time with other senses, and who smile broadly at the sound of a seagull.
I glory in church when I hear the pipe organ playing beautiful music, but smile unabashedly when an infant’s cry brings me to realize how blessed it is to hear both that organ and the baby. There are many who cannot hear.
Of the car in the driveway that isn’t new, I think how many in the world would be so grateful to have just one…bicycle to get to the next town in order to sell produce to earn money. How can I complain about my car?
I have a 401(k) retirement fund that was battered by the recession, is on the mend, yet is woefully small for my future needs. Small it may be, still it would make many in some countries enormously wealthy. Money doesn’t bring true wealth, so I could have 20 times that sum, and never be “rich” in the world’s estimation. Can I worry about that?
Recently, I went up in the attic and found so many winter coats I had forgotten about that I donated them to the church’s thrift shop. How many people don’t have even one coat to wear in the cold?
I have a job in the newspaper business. Such a thing is almost unheard of in these times og economic downturn when metropolitan papers are folding like card tables on Saturday night. We are struggling, yes, but we still print weekly. For that, we are humbled and grateful. We do our best to live within our means, and be thankful.
The Lord has blessed me — us — more than can be comprehended; still we find it far easier to complain than to give thanks.
We abound and do not realize how fortunate we are to have what we do.
At Thanksgiving, I always remember what the late Rev. William W. Shelton stated many times during his 40-year ministry in Villas: “When appreciation dies on the altar of a man’s heart, that man might as well be dead.”
The second is even more direct as we think about tomorrow and what it means in simple terms: “Every time you say thank you is 10 times you don’t have to say, ‘Please.’”
Think about these things.
Be happy to give thanks for all the bounty and wonderful things in life. If for nothing more, give thanks for life itself.