Thanksgiving 2014

I love Thanksgiving.  No, for real, I do.  It's cozy, and thankful, and wonderful, and I just love it.

Not the food.  But I've said that before.   (I just searched by blog under the "Thanksgiving" label and came up with like 10 posts about Thanksgiving.  I'm not kidding, I love everything about Thanksgiving but the food!)

Also something I've said before is that for the last several years I've had my Sunday School girls write thanksgiving lists in class.  We read verses about being thankful, talk about why we should be thankful, and to Whom we should be thankful, and then try to think of things for which to be thankful (this year I remembered to be thankful for Chipotle.  Mmm).  Usually gets some pretty good results (one of our most frequent Sunday School-and-Gospel speakers is famous for reminding us to be thankful for everything, including chairs, so almost all the girls remembered this and marked that they were thankful for chairs), but this year I heard one I hadn't heard before.

While reading around an item or two from our list one girl shared that she was thankful for my eyebrows.

"Uh, my eyebrows?  Specifically me?  Or you're thankful for your eyebrows?"

"Oh no, Miss Joanne, not my eyebrows.  Yours.  I think they look okay with your face."

"Mmmmmmmnmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmk."

And that, my friends, is the story of how I got a complex about my eyebrows and I'm not even sure why, because, comfortingly enough, they are "okay."

(Just because I couldn't resist, I searched the KJV for references to eyebrows.  There's only one direct reference, and in this reference the guy is straight-up shaving his off.  Maybe eyebrows are meant to be expendable?)

Already?

I love Thanksgiving.  It's my favorite-ever holiday, but this year it seems to have come out of nowhere!  I can't believe it's already that time of year!  We were making the lists today of what dishes we were having and I just feel like I haven't savored it enough.  But a roaring fire, some even-more-than-usually-long meals with the family, some wassail, and the smell of turkey (blegh) will doubtless cure of me of that.

Yes, remember?  I'm the weirdo who likes neither turkey nor pumpkin pie.  But being as Thanksgiving has an overabundance of food, it's not like I could possibly go hungry.  : )

Today I'm thankful for my memory.

Tomorrow!

Tomorrow, I'll wake up to a breakfast of coffee cake (best EVER), and write a Thanksgiving essay (family tradition. I pretty much write one every day leading up to Thanksgiving, though), and my mom will read my siblings and I the story of the First Thanksgiving. We'll run around the kitchen for a while, trying to make sure everything is in order, and then I'll sit down (Lord willing) with my family, though just a small portion thereof, and eat turkey (well, they'll eat it, I'll abstain due to my extreme distaste of turkey), potatoes, and other such Thanksgiving-ly food, and we'll muse over how much it is that we have to be thankful for.

That's all. Amazing that that one paragraph sums up my favorite day of the year.

Give Thanks!

I just love Thanksgiving! If I had to choose just one holiday to celebrate for a whole year, Thanksgiving would be my top choice--even over Guy Fawkes Day! It's not because I love the food (turkey, blegh), but because it's so... cozy! In a way that no other holiday is, Thanksgiving is without pretensions, I feel. Sure, it's a super shopping signal--but that's just because Christmas is around the corner. Black Friday is more about Christmas than Thanksgiving, in my opinion.

Thanksgiving is what it is: about giving thanks. There's no crazy gimmick, no bunny or fat dude or cupid, there's just family and turkey. How much better could it get? (Well, minus the turkey it could be better, but this isn't the time for me to be worrying about such things.)

Plus, I've been super encouraged recently about how awesome the assurance of Heaven is. Here's the deal--no matter how difficult our times on earth may be, no matter how much we don't feel like giving thanks, we can still rejoice, because it all ends in GLORY! Doesn't that just make every day a million times better?

So this year, if you're not feeling thankful for anything at all, just remember, no matter what trials we may experience, it'll all be worth it in HEAVEN! Even so come!