Jack of Harts

As we cross from this weekend of Thanksgiving to the Season of Christmas, I do wish to note another thing I’m thankful for. Family. My mom may be dead, but I have a large family. One of my grandmothers was on of a dozen kids, one of her siblings had a dozen kids, and most of the rest have been busy following God’s commandment to go forth and multiply, so I have a lot of cousins spread all across the country. Most of us are in Minnesota or Iowa, where we settled in the late 1800s, but we scattered out from there to California to the East Coast, with stopovers in New Mexico and Kansas. So I get to see daily messages from all over the country, from people I know and love. And that’s a good thing to be thankful for.

In this season, I’d like to give thanks for having many family and friends nearby. I’ve had more invitations for joining people for dinner than I can shake a stick at. And that is an awesome problem to have. It beats the alternative by a country mile. But we should never forget to also give thanks for all the brave soldiers who can’t spend time with their family this weekend because they are deployed far from home. They make it safe for us to celebrate and give thanks.

As we’re approaching Thanksgiving, we should remember the First Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims came to the New World to create a new community where they would share everything equally and work equally. And promptly spent the winter starving to death because the best of them worked as little as the least of them, and so they didn’t harvest enough food for all of them. They chose to give up their social equality plan after that and apportioned both the land and the harvest thereof to each family. After that, they brought in more food than they knew what to do with. And so they had a great big party with the local Indians and gave thanks to God for the bounty of food that would see them through the winter without starving. That was our First Thanksgiving.