Nov 22, 2018 2 min read

Do you really mean it?

This is the core-center, the crux, the telling point, the only measure by which Thanksgiving can mean anything.

Thanksgiving has become a complicated and difficult annual holiday. It was once a simple matter. Late in November, as winter began winding its shroud around the nation, it was natural to celebrate a day of Thanksgiving. Another large harvest was in the barns and cellars. There would be plenty for winter. The warm summer months had treated everyone well. An annual contentment then ran through the land. The contentment was easily expressed in the semi-religious atmosphere of the traditional Thanksgiving Day.

The harvest is now remote from all who do not participate in it directly. A mid-winter package of strawberries is as close as the supermarket’s freezer. We mass produce our necessities and our luxuries. There is fearful competition between income and outgo. It is necessary to afford what others dictate. The warm summer has provided time for only a crowded, expensive vacation. There is discontent and disagreement across the land.

These things make Thanksgiving a difficult holiday. It is difficult to break through the layers of self-indulgence, of non-involvement, of self-esteem, and of perfunctory obeisance to shoddy cultural standards to find the sincerity and even the simple faith that motivated other people at other Thanksgivings.

The irony is that Thanksgiving, the holiday which requires the least in physical effort, and in expenditures of worldly goods, is the one most difficult to observe properly.

Perhaps it is because it requires a humility that too few of us any longer permit ourselves.

Or perhaps it is because it requires a sincerity that is out of time with the present human endeavor.

Perhaps it is merely because proper observance of Thanksgiving requires admissions of truths to which too many eyes have been too long blind.

Perhaps it is simply because it requires that you mean it.