Thanksgiving/Advent

Thanksgiving 1971, I'm on my mom's lap in the middle-right of the picture sporting a red that I haven't worn since

With my grandfather at the same Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. While it has slowly morphed and been perverted into the day before black Friday (aptly named even if it lacked irony), I've always thought of Thanksgiving as the most incorruptible celebration. It feels like a religious  observance but it is as secular  and universal as we can get in America - gather with friends and family, eat, and be consciously appreciative of the good things in your life.

It doesn't hurt that I grew up enjoying the most wonderful, storybook Thanksgiving imaginable - a long car trip which wasn't really too long but an hour seemed like an eternity when you are five, the high point of the drive from Sonoma County to Palomares Canyon was passing the the scrap wood sculptures built in the Emeryville mud flats which signified that we were almost there. We arrived to a house filled with relatives, good smells, dill dip for the hours before the meal, cousins to play with, a contingent in the living room rooting for the Cowboys to be humiliated on national TV, everyone holding hands in a long chain snaking through the house and signing the Doxology before dinner - I always had a prevailing sense that all was right with the world. 
I grew up with this, unaware of how special it was until at 17, as an exchange student in West Germany, I spent my first lonely Thanksgiving with no family, friends, or anyone who even understood what Thanksgiving was. Just another gray Thursday in November. 
When I returned from the year in Europe, we stopped having Thanksgiving with all of the extended family together which was a change I never quite got used to. I realize now what I'm thankful for is the very fact that I enjoyed this ideal and sincere version of Thanksgiving for all of my childhood and adolescence. I still love the holiday and try to celebrate it but I do feel a sense of loss as well.
It's strange that Thanksgiving and the beginning of Advent are just a few days away this year. Advent, which never meant more to me than chocolates in a calendar that my grandma gave me, has deepened and opened up to me in the last few years. How can you enjoy the feast and the celebration of Christmas without the fast and contemplation of Advent? We're in the darkening portion of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, each day we lose a little more daylight as we move toward the solstice, waiting for the day that this will turn and we start moving back into the light, back into the hope of a new year. It truly is sensible time to slow down, reflect, and contemplate the meaning of this in whatever way in appropriate for you.  Adding a bit of Advent can make Christmas a lot more meaningful.