Thankful

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. Most holidays have been hijacked by merchandising (talk about terrorism!), but Thanksgiving doesn’t have that much to sell. How can you sell thankfulness? I wonder if Europe will soon try to do something with it. Lately Halloween has made its entry into holidays here in Belgium and the Netherlands. It’s a bit like Carnaval and you can sell costumes, gifts, books and food. Not that anyone pays attention to what the holiday is for – it is just an opportunity to sell or buy.

In the Netherlands and Belgium we celebrate “Sinter Klaas”, the birthday of St. Nicholas on 5 or 6 December. This is the time to give gifts to children. Or at least it always was. Christmas was not a time for gifts, but was purely a religious holiday (and two days worth!). Now the stores have adopted Santa Claus (although they politely wait until after December 6) and sell gifts from Halloween until Christmas. I know that most of you in the States have to put up with this on an even greater scale. At least we have Sinter Klaas to slow some of it down for a bit (am I sounding like a grumpy old man?).

Thanksgiving was always a time for family and good fellowship as I remember it. We would play badminton outside (Fall wind making it nigh to impossible, but still somehow fun) and visit with family and friends while sharing food and football. Since Europe doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, it takes some doing to get it done over here. We usually get together with Americans and Canadians (who also celebrate Thanksgiving, but on another day – even another month!) and anyone who likes the idea of Thanksgiving (which is a surprisingly? large group of people). Since most of us can’t get off on a Thursday, it is usually a weekend in the neighborhood of Thanksgiving – which usually ends up being in December. But this year it is only two days away from the “real” Thanksgiving.

Even more exciting for us is that we were able to visit with family on the very day. We called Scott’s sister where most of Scott’s family was congregated and talked a good while on the phone. We are very thankful for telephones, for houses where everyone can get together, for cars that get people to where they need to be – oh and for all that good food. We didn’t get to see (hear) everyone – Mike and Amy and the kids couldn’t make it due to sickness, we had to call at a “normal” time for us which was 10:30 p.m. and not everyone had arrived yet (only 2:30 p.m in CO) – but it was good to talk to some.

We have learned in our years together how good it is to have family all over the world. We will be spending time this year on Thanksgiving with our family as well, brothers and sisters. That is an amazing gift and we are going to enjoy it tremendously – even after Thanksgiving!