Why gratitude matters: Thanksgiving insights

What is Thanksgiving? Why should we be thankful? Is it more than a day of eating? In this post I’d like to take a break from my usual genealogy and history to share some thoughts on Thanksgiving 2024 and all the Thanksgivings before.

Thanksgiving does not have to be a literal recreation of your childhood. It’s okay to make new traditions if your old ones don’t serve you.

To me, a classic Thanksgiving dinner is a meditative process. The main course has rarely changed over the decades: turkey with dressing and gravy, mashed potatoes to soak up the gravy, and pie for dessert. It’s the Thanksgiving meal of my fantasies and the deliberate creation of comfort and tradition. I choose my traditions.

As the decades pass, I’m grateful and thankful for the upgrades. I’d like to tell you about a few of them and why they are special.

We upgraded our stove during covid. We had no choice. The oven was inoperable, the parts unavailable, and it was either buy a new stove or forego the oven forever. Thanks to an insider discount from my brother-in-law, we stretched to buy a new range with an oven so large it can fit a loaded roasting pan on one rack, and baking dishes on another. I’m especially thankful for this range remembering the year of the Thanksgiving disaster. We’d invited my husband’s friends to dinner. The Harvest Green oven stopped working mid-turkey-roast and with all the side dishes uncooked. I’ll never forget that day. We borrowed the neighbour’s kitchen to finish making dinner but I worried we could taste the burnt electrical fumes in the meat.

I still harbour this irrational dislike of green appliances.

I have top quality equipment. One of the benefits of a lifetime of investing in good tools is that eventually you’ll acquire a full set. This weekend, I assembled all the turkey dinner-making items: the bowls, food processor, knives, meat thermometer, roasting pan, stockpot, and turkey rack. I am thankful seeing them again, my old and faithful friends. I remember my first turkey pan. It was tin foil and extremely hazardous when filled with hot fat and a big bird. My roasting racks buckled under the strain of holding a large utility turkey. I didn’t have a meat thermometer and relied on math for a safe – if dry – turkey. I think of what I could afford back then and what I get to use now. The one traditional tool I use is a cleaver, still kept as razor-sharp as when it was my father’s, and I think of him every time I use it.

The outlaws downsized years ago. In a generous, unforgettable gesture, they placed their silverware on the dining room table and asked all of us to choose what we’d like. This weekend I chose from our collection the gravy boat and the covered dish for the cranberry sauce. I saw my husband’s eyes light up in recognition of his family’s silverware.

Gravy tastes better when poured from a graceful silver boat than a glass Pyrex cup.

We live in a country where the finest, freshest ingredients are available. The frozen utility turkey has been replaced by a fresh, locally-raised one. I’ve upgraded the canned Ocean Spray cranberry jelly of my husband’s childhood to a brandy-and-orange infused cranberry sauce. The Brussel sprouts are glazed with pure maple syrup. For pie, I used Tenderflake’s frozen pie shells to enfold the sour cherries from our own trees. Turkey might be my classic centrepiece but next time I might glaze some carrots, make brambleberry instead of cherry, and add sausage and potato to the dressing. I might follow my father’s recipes, or I might develop my own, secure in the bounty available to us.

Thanksgiving can be whatever you want it to be, full family affair or quiet weekend with friends, turkey or vegan, at home or in a restaurant. You don’t have to cook everything. Potluck is a thing. Follow your family’s traditions or, if they don’t serve you, feel free to make new ones that make you happy. I delight in this long weekend of creativity and memory, cherry-picking my traditions, and happily appreciative of all the things that got me here to today.

I wish you and yours a happy and peaceful Thanksgiving.

Afterword

To me, Thanksgiving is synonymous with gratitude. Gratitude is a personal practise. Years ago I wrote a weekly blog post about gratefulness – forty-eight essays in total. The first topics came easily: they were the things I loved without complication, from my red Miata to my tabby cat. I explored bathrooms, bookstores, booze, lying, and smoking. Over the months, I began to see things differently – to see positives even in despair. Eventually I began to reconsider my part in bad breakups, family dynamics, and life-threatening encounters. Gratitude is the antidote to the thiefs of joy: criticism, envy, grudge-keeping, regret, and toxicity. In addition, gratitude has a host of benefits from reduced blood pressure, inflammation, and stress; to increased happiness and humility. This Thanksgiving, I embrace a traditional dinner and all the stories that got us here.

Thank yous

As well as the pleasures of a memorable weekend, I’m grateful to the Chinese Canadian men and women who served in the Second World War. In my Force 136 Research Project, sponsored by the Chinese Canadian Military Museum Society, we are researching the lives of select individuals, what they endured, and their towering achievements. Unwanted by the Canadian military, secretly sidelined by Premier Pattulo for fear their enlistment would gain them the vote, the Chinese Canadian veterans fought before, during, and after the war to gain the rights of citizenship.

My rights. I will forever be grateful. We shall remember.