Dear Reader,

My two-year-old daughter is a girl of few words.  She is learning language a little differently than her siblings, who all had fairly large vocabularies at her age.  But she seems to be content with the handful of words at her disposal and in no rush for expansion.  She says what she has to say.  And the main thing she has to say is “Thank you.”  Or, more precisely, “Tank doo.”  

Scarcely an hour goes by that she does not express her tankfulness for something or another. “Tank doo for get my blanklet, Daddy.” “Tank doo for cut my apple, Mommy.”  At a restaurant the other day, she spilled a plate of food on the floor.  The staff seemed charmed if a bit surprised upon “Tank doo for clean up my mess.”

We’ve not pressed her into it; perhaps occasionally some early, in-passing lessons on manners, but she’s too young for any rigorous expectations.  Yet there it is.  It seems somehow just to flow naturally, to arise from her simple embrace of the world she has been given.  C.S. Lewis said that gratitude looks to the past and love looks to the present, but I wonder if these two things are really more intertwined than that.  There’s not much other than the present when you’re two years old.  Actually, there’s not much other than the present for anyone.

The United States will now celebrate Thanksgiving Day.  Increasingly, that seems to involve a lot of looking to the past.  Much ado has been made by disgruntled modernity about Thanksgiving’s allegedly contrived origins, self-serving myths, questionable motives, and damage done.  It is now a controversial holiday, and some people would like to get rid of it.  I suppose some of what they say is true.  Grave sins have been committed in our land.

But still, it’s a bit remarkable, don’t you think? The Pilgrims, who had struggled through a horrific first winter, who had dropped in number from one-hundred-and-two Mayflower passengers in the autumn of 1620 to about fifty still alive in the autumn of 1621, chose to gather to hold a festival of Thankfulness.  It is hard not to be impressed with the childlike gratitude.  

And in fact, it was not just child like — in large part it was literally the gratitude of children.  As with our own recent pandemic, the disease that afflicted the Pilgrim settlers affected adults more severely than youth.  It was likely the same epidemic that had killed two thousand local Wampanoag people before the Mayflower arrived; we might reasonably guess that their population also had an unusually high percentage of children by the time the two groups met.

Thus, historical records show that more than half of the Pilgrims still alive for the feast were children and adolescents.  There were only four adult women left.  The “First Thanksgiving” was, in a real sense, a children’s party.   Regardless of what else may be true or false, good or bad, four hundred or so years ago a group of children, who had suffered greatly, sat together and gave thanks.  

I cannot help but wonder if perhaps it was even the children’s own idea; children often seem to suggest such things.  As the bedraggled, widowed adults stood at the threshold of a second American winter, perhaps some little person in simple embrace of the world she had been given, let flow her natural gratitude — and proposed they all ought to pause their winter preparations for a while to do the same.  

In any case, whatever the precise history, I’m not aware of many things in life that have a perfect and unblemished and unassailable past.  And wherever gratitude may look to, gratitude can only exist in the present.  If we’re orienting our consciousness toward our actual moment in time, if we let love animate that moment, if we take seriously the dictum that starts “Unless you become like little children . . . ,” then I suspect we naturally experience life and undertake its various adventures from a position of gratitude.  Whereby we’ll be better able to understand and rectify the sins of the past.  And when we need to contemplate the future, gratitude in the present will give rise to faith and hope — instead of fear and greed — as we look ahead. 

In short, gratitude is proof (from earliest days) that we are human, and an act by which we become more so. It is a joyous duty we owe.  Setting aside a single day a year to focus on it is eminently reasonable.  So my little daughter and I and all of our house will retain the tradition.  We’ll be gathering together, eating turkey and saying prayers and decking the place out with little wicker cornucopias or whatnot.  It’s a heritage worth holding on to.  And it’s the sort of thing we can all be unabashedly thankful (and tankful) for.

Sincerely,