Photo Credit: Christian Hansen
[CAF Note: There is no Solari Report this week. I invited the newest member of our team, Solari Report producer Kristen Linton, to write a special blog post to celebrate the occasion. I hope you will take the time to enjoy this wonderful season and contemplate our many blessings. On behalf of all the members of the Solari Team…..Happy Thanksgiving!]
By Kristen Linton
It’s easy to forget about Thanksgiving. On November 1 you find yourself at the Target walking past a display rack of synthetic wigs, face paint, fangs, and witches hats which have found their way to the front of the store at prices marked down 50% (What a steal. I totally need a pink fairy glitter stick! I’ll use it next year). As you scurry past the mountains of enticingly priced, high-fructose corn syrup pumped sweets (why do you still have trouble resisting them even after watching numerous documentaries about the poisons they contain?) you find yourself singing along to Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas”. Suddenly you shake your head in an Etch-A-Sketch motion and wonder aloud, “Wait a minute! What ever happened to Thanksgiving?”
As good American capitalists, we are trained to consume. Consume candy candy candy. Get all hopped up on treats and buy glow-in-the-dark fingernails, spider rings, Mitt Romney masks, princess gowns, Harry Potter wands, skeletons, plastic spiders, and cauldrons. Once that consumption is over, the push for the holiday sell is on. It’s time to buy the Christmas necessities: Santa hats, reindeer headbands, and inflatable snow globes for your lawn. All of this has me wondering: What does Thanksgiving have to offer?
Well for one thing, Thanksgiving offers just what it is. It offers giving thanks, and sometimes the simplest act of looking up at the glorious leaves on a crisp autumn day and giving thanks for this life on Earth is all one needs to calm and lift one’s spirit. It seems simple enough to do every day, but somehow it manages to escape us. In this time of uncertainty as some of us suffer from PEB (Post Election Blues), and worry about how much money will be harvested from our pockets in 2013 it certainly is very easy to get caught up in angst and dread. In order to avoid these paralyzing and unproductive emotions in a Julie Andrews Sound of Music style, I remind myself of my favorite things and give thanks.
I am thankful for: family, friends, fairs, and Fridays. For pink purses, yogi tea, café lattes, and hole-the-wall bars. For gentlemen dressed in three piece suits, rain boots, suspenders, and bow ties. For theater, twinkly lights, wool socks, and farm raised animals. For dogs, cats, sneezing pandas, and bats. For smiles, laughter, hugs, and tears. For cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, and juicing machines. For bike rides, dances, yoga, and runs. For music, art, books, and poems. For Jeffrey M. Smith, Dr. Katherine Albrecht, John Taylor Gatto, and Marilyn Waring. For the air that I breath, the sunshine above, the water I drink, and the thinks that I think. I am thankful for this day – this day I have been given. I will march on, past the dancing santas and the Ho Ho Ho sweater vests, unplug from the crazy and give thanks, for this is the day that the Lord has made and I will rejoice and be glad in it.
Thank you! Give thanks and praise!
