Gratitude Might Just Be The Greatest Blessing
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
With barely five weeks left in the year, the American calendar pauses for its strangest, most fragile institution: a holiday nominally about gratitude, staged against a backdrop of overfull tables and overfull parking lots. Thanksgiving, which colonists and their descendants have been improvising in one form or another on this continent since at least the late sixteenth century, has always been an uneasy braid of piety, hunger and politics.
In 1863, with the country split open by war, Abraham Lincoln tried to fix this floating observance in place, asking Americans to mark the last Thursday of November as a shared day of “Thanksgiving and Praise” even as they buried their dead. His proclamation, drafted in the language of an older religious confidence, urged the nation to acknowledge its “perverseness and disobedience” and to commend widows, orphans and other sufferers “in the lamentable civil strife” to divine care—a call less to triumph than to repentance, less to feasting than to national self-examination.
The idea was simple enough: once a year, set aside the cult of scarcity and remember that the country, for all its sins, swam in “singular deliverances and blessings.” In places like Anderson County that impulse still surfaces in the most old-fashioned ways, as volunteers at missions, food pantries and church basements trade their own holiday leisure to cook, carry plates and call strangers “neighbor” for an afternoon. On a day that can so easily become a performance of abundance, the Haven of Rest, Anderson Interfaith Ministries, the Salvation Army, Meals on Wheels, Clean Start, the Good Neighbor Cupboard and a long litany of churches quietly try to redeem the script by feeding those who cannot count on any table at all.
Around countless dining-room tables, there is a familiar ritual: someone suggests that each person, between bites of turkey and sweet potatoes, name one thing for which they are grateful. The answers, like the dishes, are predictable—family, friends, health, a job—and yet the exercise persists, perhaps because even a forced articulation of gratitude nudges the brain away from its usual, vigilant scan for what is missing. Elsewhere, in refugee camps and drought-browned villages, people stand in slow, resigned lines for rice, beans or a plastic jug of water, an image that hovers uncomfortably behind the heaped platters and the casual scraping of leftovers into the trash.
For most Americans, the truth is awkwardly dual: they do not have everything they want, but they have far more than they need. The old Thanksgiving ideal suggests that such surplus carries an obligation—that gratitude, if it is to be more than sentiment, must eventually extend outward, in casseroles carried to shut-ins, in donations, in the simple refusal to ignore the neighbor whose lights stay off at night. The distance between that vision and the one now beamed out in glossy circulars and midnight doorbuster ads marks one of the season’s most glaring contradictions.
Over the past decade, the holiday devoted to giving thanks has become the soft launch for a long, noisy campaign of acquisition. Black Friday, once the unofficial starting gun of the shopping season, has crept backward onto the calendar, swallowing Thursday afternoon and evening as big-box stores unlock their doors and floodlit parking lots fill with shoppers still wearing the sweaters they put on for dinner. The bargain, for retail workers, is cruelly asymmetrical: in exchange for wages that often lag behind the national average, they are asked to surrender one of their few guaranteed days off so that strangers can abandon their own family tables in the name of “saving” money.
There is a small, stubborn form of protest available to everyone else: staying home. Choosing not to cross the threshold of a store on Thanksgiving is a way of declining to participate in the quiet erosion of a day that was meant, at least in Lincoln’s framing, to slow the nation down. The shelves and screens will still be there on Friday; the algorithms will still remember what you almost bought. What will not easily be recovered, once it is ceded, is the expectation that there are still a few days in the year when the cash register does not get top billing over the dining-room table.
The paradox is that Thanksgiving’s original promise has gained empirical backing just as its cultural footing has grown less secure. Study after study suggests that people who cultivate gratitude—not the murky, once-a-year kind, but the daily, disciplined version—sleep better, report less depression and stress, exercise more, and even show lower blood pressure and healthier hearts. Researchers have tracked participants who kept simple gratitude lists for a year and found not only shifts in mood but changes in relationships, as people who paused to catalogue small mercies became more patient, more generous, more inclined to interpret others’ actions charitably.
Getting to that state—where gratitude is not an annual performance but a background condition—turns out to be less mystical than it sounds. The practice is almost insultingly modest: naming, out loud or on paper, a few specific things each day that did not have to happen but did, and doing so long enough that the brain begins to look for them on its own. Over months, the habit of scanning for gifts rather than threats appears to reorient both thought and physiology, making people more resilient in the face of loss and more resistant to the low-grade hum of anxiety that modern life treats as baseline.
As holiday advice goes, this sounds suspiciously like homework: resolve, amid the cooking and the travel delays and the football games, to begin a year-long experiment in gratitude. No ribbon, no receipt, no space under the tree required—just a notebook by the bed, or a note on the phone, or a quiet moment at the sink naming the day’s undeserved gifts. G. K. Chesterton, whose imagination specialized in making the ordinary seem newly strange, once observed that “thanks are the highest form of thought” and that “gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder,” a sentence that sounds, in late November, less like a clever epigram than like a blunt prescription.
If Thanksgiving still has any power left, it may lie here: not in the sheer volume of food or the efficiency of the sales, but in the chance, however brief, to feel happiness doubled by wonder and to recognize that such wonder is, in fact, available every day.
