Thanksgiving is a holiday for the resilient, for people like Louisiana hurricane victim Debbie Shifter, who’s cooking holiday dinner for 18 in the tiny kitchen of a government-issue trailer.
Her steadfastness in the face of adversity is an example for all of us, whether we’ve had a peaceful year or if we feel battered by wars, the economy, natural disaster or personal challenges.
While Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims as early as 1621 (and by Spanish pioneers in New Mexico before that), it became an official holiday during one of our nation’s bloodiest and angriest times, the Civil War.
President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving Day a federal holiday to be observed on the last Thursday of November. That came in 1863, only a few months after the Battle of Gettysburg, with more than 51,000 Union and Confederate casualties.
Toward the end of the Great Depression, another dark time in our history, President Franklin Roosevelt, hoping to stimulate the economy with a longer holiday shopping season, in 1939 moved Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of November. Congress made it the fourth Thursday in November on the eve of World War II in 1941.
While some countries slipped into fascism during the Depression, the United States survived with its democratic institutions intact and, indeed, strengthened.
As we sit down today with family and friends to enjoy Broncos football, family Frisbee games in the park and Thanksgiving feasts, we think not only of our personal blessings but also of those who are serving their country, indeed serving all of us, in distant and dangerous surroundings. We cannot forget those families with empty places at their tables and the sacrifice those vacant chairs represent.
We reflect also on hundreds of thousands of Americans displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and of millions more who struggle through tough economic circumstances or face the loss of jobs in the new year.
The American dream can be an uncertain journey, but we can all be thankful that ancestors have laid the path out before us.
