Starting November With Thanksgiving

It always happens overnight. One minute there are jack-o-lanterns and trick-or-treaters, and the next minute there are Christmas trees. The stores and the advertisements all leapfrog from Halloween to Christmas in the blink of an eye. It didn’t used to be this way, but Thanksgiving has lost its place in the Fall holiday lineup.

But there have always been three stages of Fall decorating at our house. I haven’t decorated for Halloween since my children left home, but the first stage of Fall begins in late September with pumpkins, scarecrows, and brightly colored leaves. When the weather starts to chill in October, spicy candles and pumpkin desserts add to the cozy Fall feeling in our home.

The next stage usually happens on the first day of November. This is when turkeys, cornucopia, and other Thanksgiving decorations come out. There are several plaques or tabletop knick-knacks that carry essentially the same message, reminding us to “give thanks” or “count our blessings”. We spend most of the month focusing on the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.

The final Fall decorating stage at our house usually begins the day after Thanksgiving, when the colors of autumn are removed and the trimmings of Christmas start to appear. Since I absolutely love Christmas and have been gathering decorations for a lot of years, this process takes over a week to fully complete. But it never starts before Thanksgiving Day is over.

There is no right way to celebrate holidays, and I understand why stores focus only on holidays that earn them money. Thanksgiving isn’t really a day that they can capitalize on. But I do wish that we would spend more time focusing on the message of Thanksgiving – to truly spend time being thankful for all of our blessings. Thanksgiving is definitely intended to be about more than football and overeating and Christmas shopping deals.

No, we don’t have to do any specific things surrounding Thanksgiving Day in order to truly be thankful. What really matters is our hearts. And we can have a “gratitude attitude” any day of the year. But since we have a national holiday about being thankful, why don’t we make an extra effort this year to focus our attention for the month of November on all of the blessings we have . . . and to spend time expressing our thanks to the One from whom all blessings flow. 

Let’s choose to remember the importance of being grateful before we rush into the biggest season of celebration and joy. We just might discover that we have even more to rejoice about!