We celebrated Thanksgiving here in our own home...our first one at home since our fire. We spent the day with our good friends on our street, the Enochses and the Kimberlins. We had a mini progressive...appetizers at Jen's, main dinner at our house, and dessert at Nancy's. It was a fun day. The kids all played and ran together all day long. It's a wonderful feeling to be part of a neighborhood like ours especially on holidays where you have no family near to celebrate with.
Before dinner at our house, Jim pulled out an article from the newspaper and said he wanted to read something to all of us.
On Thanksgiving, families gather together and express gratitude for the bounty in their lives.
But what is family these days? Of course, it's parents, children and siblings--blood realtives. but with American families becoming so mobile, so scattered and so displaced, many people form close family-like attachments to friends, making them siblings by choice, brothers and sisters of life.
Perhaps this year, the prosperity we celebrate at Thanksgiving should not only be for the material riches of our lives but also for the human ones. After all, the bounty of living may not just be the abundance of goods spilling out of the cornucopia of life, but the richness of the relationships we have cultivated and harvested in our lifetime.
When we sit down to our feast of Thanksgiving this year, we should give thanks for that other family, that chosen family--our human harvest of enduring friendships. And they're easy to name, too. They're the ones who made a difference. "No love, no friendhsip," wrote Nobel Prize winner Francois Mauriac, "can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever."
I didn't know Jim was going to read this so I was caught off guard and it brought tears to my eyes. I am so thankful for all my family and friends.
1 comments:
Uh, yeah, Jason read the same article outloud on Thanksgiving too...so not what happened =)Jim's cool
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