Louise T. Guinther

I love Thanksgiving. For one thing, I love baking pies, and Thanksgiving is a great excuse for doing that. (Since I also love eating pies, it all works out quite nicely, except for the effect on my waistline.) Furthermore, I like parades, dogs and the Detroit Lions, which means there are so many things for me to be thankful for on Thanksgiving Day that I hardly know where to look first.

But I also love the act of giving thanks. It seems to me that a lot of the time, our modern world doesn’t want us to be thankful. We are bombarded constantly with everything around us that’s wrong, sad, cynical, cruel and downright loathsome, until it begins to feel almost arrogant to feel gratitude. “How can I be thankful for what I have, when so many people are suffering in the world?” is a refrain I’ve heard over and over again.

Thanksgiving is a delight for me because it’s the one day in the year when we have full permission to dwell on the things that are right and happy in our lives instead of focusing doggedly on the things that are wrong.

George Bernard Shaw’s Captain Bluntschli says, in Arms and the Man, “Do you like gratitude? I don’t. If pity is akin to love, gratitude is akin to the other thing.” I heartily disagree. Clearly, Shaw is thinking of gratitude as some sort of distasteful onus imposed by society, but real gratitude is a natural effusion of good feeling that springs from the depths of one’s soul. Like Shakespeare’s mercy, “it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” Thanking someone is a chance to revel once again in whatever gift, service or kindness one has received. It’s a way to reinforce positive behavior so the person being thanked will feel appreciated and inspired to do something nice again. It’s the act of making someone feel good for making you feel good — a sort of virtuous circle, if you will.

The word gratitude derives from the Latin “gratia,” which means grace, favor or kindness. In Middle English, “grace” referred specifically to help from God, and although Thanksgiving is widely regarded these days as a secular holiday, more about turkey and football than Pilgrims and Indians, it’s still pretty clear whom we are meant to be thanking on the fourth Thursday in November every year. The chance to thank God is even more precious than the chance to thank friends and family, since it is the only way we have to repay His bounty. So I count among my blessings this chance to count my blessings, and I offer heartfelt thanks to the powers that be, on earth and in heaven, for giving us one day to celebrate grace and gratitude.