Category Archives: Thankfulness

About Finishing

Posted on by
new years eve celebration
[Photo by olia danilevich on Pexels.com]

I am a finisher. Oh, not necessarily of marathons or anything like that. No, I am more the kind of person who gets a weird satisfaction out of finishing the last cracker in the box or making someone eat the last pickle in the jar. Then I can recycle the box or wash up the jar and feel strangely that I completed something and all the detritus has gone to its rightful place: the recycle bin, the storage room, someone’s intestines.

I have to admit that I’m a little (okay, a lot) like this when it comes to the end of the year. On December 1, I look longingly toward my new planner (that I ordered in September) and get “excited” about penciling in all the birthdays and paydays and Canadian holidays that my American planner doesn’t have the good sense to include. Making the first mark in it is difficult for me, however. I subscribe to Anne Shirley’s philosophy: “Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”

It is nice to think that, but it is also a little naive. Turning the page to January 1, 2021 is not a magic spell, except in my brain, which is a real place and I can’t wholly discount the power of the mind to create something tangible. And 2020 has been – shall we say – a little surreal. To quote Barbara Poelle in the latest issue of Writer’s Digest: “This year there was a global pandemic, a sonic boom of needed steps in social and racial justice…an election cycle that is rocking the foundation of (their) nation…and murder hornets.”

And so I find myself once again in The In Between. I don’t think it’s any mistake that we celebrate Christmas at the end of the year – there’s all sorts of circumstantial evidence that Jesus was born around this time – but also Christmas makes us sloooowwww down, before we start mistaking up a whole new year. Oh, sure, it may feel like your days are whizzing by with the extra chores of shopping and baking and wrapping and decorating – or whatever extras you assign to December. These things keep me grounded firmly in the present, away from wishing away the time and also, away from that spanky new planner.

Last weekend, Rick and I put up our Christmas tree. We enjoyed it unadorned except for lights for an evening and then, on Sunday, as we pulled out the boxes of decorations, I groaned and wished that the Christmas Tree Decorating Fairy would show up and do this for me. But I knew that She/He didn’t really exist and I might as well “get it over with”. Because I do like me a decorated tree to look at every day of December. And Fairies, though prodigious in their powers, probably do not know how exactly I like the ribbon to go around my tree and which decorations need to be relegated to the backside because I love them less than others that deserve front-and-center prominence.

And it was a lovely afternoon: just me and my husband and Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey engaging in a tradition that is timeless and ever-new. And it was nice to get it done before December 1 – a little less rushed than if we squeezed it into a weeknight in the middle of the month and a little more special because we did it together.

As much as I like to Finish Things, there’s a lot to be said for Holding Off, Slowing Down & Pausing. After all, it’s not really good sense to eat twenty Oreos just so I can recycle the box. It’s also not good sense to waste all my December days wishing for January 1. The shopping, the baking, the wrapping, the decorating are ALL GOOD THINGS. I will try to savor my Oreos one at a time and give thanks for all the days that I get to have.

About Flu Season

Posted on by

Hey, guess what? It’s flu season.

(Ducks to avoid rotten tomatoes, paper airplanes made from cancelled flight tickets, and cardboard boxes now empty of disposable masks.)

Yeah, I know. Remember the good ole days, those days of auld lang syne, when one would get the flu and puke your guts out and moan for a few days and have to learn how to walk all over again just to get on the scale and find out that you lost 7 pounds in addition to maybe three days of your life?

Yeah, coronavirus is not that kind of flu.

I have my share of vivid memories of having the flu. Me, nine months pregnant with Timmy, huddled over a basin on the floor trying to manage dry-heaving and Braxton-Hicks contractions at the same time. Me, again, last Christmas when I was deathly ill from a flu I caught from my husband that we then shared with EVERYONE else in our vicinity. (And that we secretly wonder if it was some sort of pandemic-prequel.)

I have another flu-tinged memory: me, again, back before I got pregnant with Tim. My dear friend Lynn took care of Gil until his daddy got home from work, leaving me alone to my symptoms. Too weak (maybe?) to climb the stairs to my bed, I opted for the floor in front of the television. This was back when we had Super Channel – the premier movie subscription channel of the time. The movie playing was The English Patient. I wasn’t English and I wasn’t wrapped up in bandages, but at that moment in time, Ralph Fiennes and I had our supine positions in common.

And I will forever hate that movie.

Was it the flu that colored my dislike so much? Or did I somehow peer into the future and see Lord Voldemort? I’ll never know because I WILL NOT RE-WATCH THAT MOVIE OR READ THAT BOOK. Just the thought of it makes me nauseated.

It makes me wonder what about this whole world-wide virus epidemic will leave us with bad associations. Presidential races? (Well, the virus can’t be completely to blame for that.) The smell of tequila-tinged hand sanitizer? The feel of a giant Q-tip up your nose assessing your positive or negative status because you sneezed a couple times at your place of employ?

Yes, there will be bad memories when we think of 2020. Just the idea of another holiday coming up and wondering how to navigate it makes us wonder about the whole notion of Thanksgiving. (Let’s not even start thinking ahead to Christmas.)

I had a chance encounter this week with an old friend at the Coop where we were buying our Thanksgiving turkeys. I bemoaned the idea of another ambiguous get-together: I miss the freedom of hugging with abandon, of open door policies for the boys’ friends, of not having to THINK about dos and don’ts so much when it comes to just celebrating with family. And my friend reminded me that, on the flip side, many people are more thankful for their families than they were before coronavirus.

It’s good spiritual chiropractic, to have your thinking adjusted like that. There’s a lot that’s wrong with the world right now. But, as always, there’s a lot that is right.

Happy Thanksgiving.

About FOMO and JOMO

Posted on by

I don’t know about you but I’m not sure that I want to be a part of this global pandemic thingy anymore.

Okay, I know I don’t really have an option. But after nearly six months of this, some serious FOMO is starting to set in. Even though some of the things I’m missing aren’t even there anymore. Like outdoor festivals (which I usually don’t go to) or sports (which I usually don’t watch). So it’s not so much FOMO as just MO.

Plus, I’m starting to miss weird things.

Like the ridiculous amounts of Back-To-School fliers that inundated my recycle box in all the previous years that didn’t begin with the numbers 202… Or the over-zealous same TV commercials that showed off tiny children wearing clothing way more fashionable than mine. Instead, there’s just Apple and Amazon commercials telling me that It’s going to be okay. (Because they’re the two companies making the most moneys right now. So I guess it’s nice of them to share…sentiment?)

I also find I’m missing crowds. Normally I can do without shouldering my way through people in shopping malls. But a visit to West Edmonton Mall this week was just eerie. I mean, WHERE DID ALL THE PEOPLE GO? Answer: At home on their iPhones placing another Amazon order.

I’m also missing playing chicken on the sidewalks. I mean, in a normal non-COVID season, one would walk towards someone on the sidewalk and play that little psychological game with them of “You-move-I’m-not-moving.” You might even (gasp!) TOUCH THEM as you swerve by. But now oncomers move differentially to each other, creating cow-paths on peoples’ lawns and preferring oncoming traffic to touching an actual human being with a six-foot pole. It makes me want reflexively check my deodorant levels, but then I remember – Oh right, it’s just an epidemic.

A solution, perhaps, would be to embrace JOMO – the joy of missing out. I mean, there is a certain simplicity in less: less people, less (physical) shopping, less decisions – because they’re just not there to make. But I feel like I’m completely glossing over all the really-real problems. After all, not-shopping is not technically a hardship, at least not-shopping for new clothes and school supplies at the malls when most of last year’s will do just fine.

Maybe there were aspects of the world as we knew it that weren’t particularly healthy – I mean, if people aren’t at the malls and in the restaurants and swerving on the sidewalks, that’s not really essential anyway, is it? But as I miss things as they were, I need to ask myself what exactly am I struggling with?

I am struggling with change. I kind of liked the world – with all its craziness – just the way it was. I’m sad for businesses and sports and churches that have had to shut down and are figuring out how to survive – or realizing they can’t.

I am struggling with uncertainty. I was told this week that THIS might last for two, maybe even three years. I don’t even want to say that out loud, but there it is. Buckle up and settle in – COVID appears to be the new tenant in the building previously occupied by HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, EMPLOYED and UNPHASED-BY-COMMON-COLD-SYMPTOMS. And we don’t know how long of a lease Mr. Epidemic took out.

And I’m struggling with plain old selfishness. I want things to be the way they used to be. I want to not wear a mask, not worry about visiting people outside of my bubble and not give a second thought to touching them. I want to travel again and not shake my head at Americans (over this). I also want kids to go to school and for teachers not to have to worry about disinfecting every surface, every second of every day. I want health-care workers to be able to relax a little and for people who are immunocompromised not consider everything a life-threatening decision.

Maybe it’s not even about shopping, not even a little bit. Maybe I want my party not just with cake, but with people, too, the way it used to be. I’m not sure I even want to think about Christmas and how different that will be.

But maybe realizing what I miss is actually making me more thankful for what was, what is. And let’s hope, for what will someday be, even if it looks a little different.

About Gardening

Posted on by

It’s only late June but already my vegetable garden is promising to be amazing. NOT.

Sigh.

One of the things I’ve come to realize over the last few years is that while I love me some fresh garden veggies – tender peas still in the pod, green beans that have never been frozen, carrots with dirt still on them – I’m not as enthusiastic about all that has to go into growing those things myself.

The trouble is this: vegetables, like babies, refuse to be independent. Gardens need to be weeded, watered, fertilized – and not by the neighbor’s cat. If it doesn’t rain regularly, my garden is in trou-ble. And I tend to wait until the weeds are large enough not to mistake them for fledgling zucchini plants that I sowed too late and too deep. But you never know. Hope spring eternal that old seeds will birth future zucchini cakes.

It’s not really the once-a-week kind of commitment that I tend to make it. My inner monologue goes something like this:

“Oh hey, Self, let’s go look at the garden.” This necessitates I don my flip flops and traipse out the backdoor as my raised boxes are hidden from easy window surveillance. The garden doesn’t make any noise, either, demanding constant inspection like the neighbors jackhammering their sidewalk. (What are they doing with that shed in the backyard, anyways?)

And then. “Oh, sh*t! Half the cucumbers plants died? And shrivelled into dental floss? What? How? Ohhhh, I suuuuuuckkk at this.” There is no sign of any zucchini plants performing a Lazarus. The beans are looking sketchy, despite the fact that I double-sowed them. And only half the sunflowers are on their way to not making it through the summer. Thankfully, every single tomato plant, of which I planted way too many are stretching to the sky and enjoying the hot southern side of the house. Maybe they like the privacy.

It’s not like I don’t know how this should go. I was birthed by a Gardener Extraordinaire. Mom’s gardens weren’t just the means for her to feed her family and teach us to love All The Green and Growing Things – they were also her canvas. She created fantastical flower beds full of all the old favorites – petunias, geraniums, delphiniums, sweet peas, snap dragons, bleeding hearts and tiger lilies (to name only a few). But Mom also did magical things with her vegetable gardens. One garden spot was never enough and, in each spot, you would find repeats of everything she planted in different configurations: rows parallel and perpendicular, bunches, square plots, volunteer dill everywhere and all of it hedged in with cotoneasters, lilac bushes and raspberry canes.

A visit to Mom’s house in the summer always ended in the garden, but sometimes began there, too, if she was prowling around it like a grown-up Mary Lennox in her Secret Garden when we arrived. She would be ready for a break and we’d go to the cool of the house for an instant coffee or better yet, her vegetable soup if we made it in time for lunch (which was 11:30 not noon.) Summer visits sometimes meant helping Mom with some weeding or picking 5-gallon-pails of beans or peas or ice-cream pails laced and tied to your waist with old nylons for a hands-free raspberry-picking experience. And bonus, you got to take your winnings home – you were doing her a favor.

When it was nearly time to go home, we’d go dig up some new potatoes, some onions, some carrots and wash them in the big tub under the outdoor tap and Mom would send us home with the pail of artfully arranged wet and gorgeous veggies. Supper was easy that night, which was a good thing because I would have a lot of shelling and blanching of peas and beans to do. Once, when touring my boys through, Mom pulled up an onion and Simon asked what it was. His Baba laughed and said, “It’s an onion. Do you want a bite?” And so, Simon did take a bite – it looked that good.

During Mom’s last summer, when she had moved to Vermilion, I was able to pop in on her quite often. Despite cancer, despite feeling crappy most of the time, in between the many naps she had to take each day – I would find her in the yard, watering the plants, picking some weeds, pulling up some carrots, cutting some flowers to take indoors. Her garden never flagged, not for one moment. She knew what it took.

I know what it takes, too, but I’m not there. Thankfully, there are people around me who still let me stroll through their canvases and inhale that mysteriously fragrant combination of dirt, rain and leaf that I grew up with. Sometimes they send me home with a zucchini or two. But I’m okay, I have my own tomatoes.

I don’t have to be a great gardener to appreciate the magic that takes place in garden plots every year or to remember the riches of my mother’s garden. And bonus: my husband says he needs a new hobby. Maybe he’ll take up gardening.

About Toilet Paper and Disappointment

Posted on by

Until further notice, hockey has been cancelled. And basketball. And probably other stuff, but I’m trying not to listen/look at the news anymore than is reasonable. And with those beeping devices at our fingertips 24/7, that is not easy. It’s all so, well…disappointing. And sobering.

And let’s face it: things change mighty fast. Two months ago, we heard about an escalating health crisis in Asia, two weeks ago Italy – Italy! – got shut down, two days ago we were joking in my exercise class about all the panick-ers emptying the store shelves of toilet paper. And two hours ago, I began to take stock of my pantry shelves – including toilet paper. And thinking maybe we should stop recycling our newspapers for awhile. Just, you know, in case.

And then this morning I heard that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have become Hollywood’s first couple of COVID-19. How very Forrest Gump of him, getting in on it. Don’t get me wrong, I love Tom. And I love his Twitter-ing reassurance that protocol is being followed and all will be well.

Although we haven’t come in contact personally with anyone who has contracted the coronavirus, it’s starting to get closer to home, both geographically and other ways, too. Rick and I had a trip planned for early April. Cancelled. The conference I was going to go to? Cancelled. Hockey game tomorrow night? Cancelled.

Sooooo, none of those things are life-changing for us. But when everything starts to get cancelled, it starts to look grim. Just think about all the other people affected by those cancellations: not just hockey players and other professional athletes, but everybody who works for those organizations. Everyone who works in hotels and restaurants. And then there are the schools facing closures. Hospitals responding to this pandemic.

It’s pretty obvious that there’s soon not going to be any six degrees of separation.

Maybe if we just knew how long it was all going to last, it would be easier to take. Oh, but, yeah...nobody knows that. That’s why everyone is trying to corner the toilet paper market. And, full disclosure: I bought some yesterday. Just, you know, in case.

But if we really think about it, we don’t EVER really know what is going to happen or how long something is going to last. Our family has had our lives turn on a dime many times with events that were life-changing for us, times when you drop everything to attend to what really matters.

When my conference got cancelled a couple a days ago, I had a moment of despair: what if we never get to travel again? Chalk it up to a healthy imagination and a recent reading of Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic-themed book Station Eleven. (Trust me: this is not a good time to take note of one of my book recommendations.) If we couldn’t travel again, if we had to rearrange our lives, if we had to bunker down – we would survive. Well, hopefully, since most people who contract the virus recover just fine, if it just takes a little time.

And outside my window today, the sun is shining. It will probably come up again tomorrow. The couple who bought our last house had a baby yesterday and I was sent the news on my iPhone this morning, complete with a picture of the miracle. Another friend sent a message that her dad who is on life support, has taken a turn for the better. And my kids are sending Homer Simpson gifs to our family conversation because a sense of humor really helps. And because: Homer Simpson.

So, my phone can be the bearer of good news as well as bad. Life is not all disappointing and sobering. And let’s hope that if it really does get crazy, we can all spare a square if someone needs it.

About Shovelling Snow

Posted on by

For this month and the last one, we own two houses in Vermilion. We are downsizing from our current 4-bedrooms-are-empty-why-are-we-still-cleaning-them house to a much more manageable 4-bedrooms-still-are empty-but-one’s-an-office-and-one’s-a-closet-so-not-really-as-bad. And we are losing a whole floor, so there’s that.

With said early acquisition of the new house – for purposes of painting and re-carpeting BEFORE we move in – there’s an extra two month burden of mortgage payments, taxes, utilities – but we went into that part knowingly.

But maybe I forgot about the snow.

Yes, with two houses, there’s two driveways. Granted, the downsized house has just a teeny-tiny driveway compared to the old house. But it also has a sidewalk that must be shovelled or else People Get Mad and you become A Bad Neighbor and A Lousy Citizen. (Also, I learned this week, that dog-owners don’t retrieve their dog’s poop from deeply snowy sidewalks because it just disappears down into the snow and freezes to the sidewalk, irretrievable and undetectable, until my snow shovel hits it and I nearly go end-over-end like hitting my brakes too hard on a bike. That stuff sticks.)

If it was summer, we would have two lawns to mow. But grass grows in a rather predictable fashion and usually one budgets once a week to keep the blades at bay.

Snow is a much more arbitrary foe.

Granted my new driveway is teeny-tiny. The first couple skiffs of snow were easily managed in record time. But a small driveway makes no difference when Canada decides to bless us with frozen moisture. It can PILE UP. And so I find myself getting a workout of workouts when I let it do just that.

There’s really no getting around it. Like dirty dishes or laundry, sooner or later, chores have to be dealt with or else you commit to living in a pigsty or getting stuck in your own driveway. It’s one of those “life things” and having a good attitude about it just feels better than crabbing about it. But if I do descend into the woe-is-me’s, I try to remember my mom.

A few years ago, Mom moved from farm to town and she, too, had a driveway that she needed to keep clean for the above-said reasons. And the winter after she moved in was a snowy one. Never one to shirk work, that winter, however, Mom wasn’t able to get out to shovel the snow. A couple of carpal-tunnel surgeries and the worst flu she ever succumbed to kept her in the house. We kids and grandkids would all take our turns cleaning her very long driveway.

One day I sent Tim over to Baba’s house to do the job. He told me later that for the entire time, she presided at the window, vicariously shovelling snow with him. When Tim went in after for the usual Baba-mandated-snack, she told him a story about how her neighbor across the street threw a bag of garbage in his bin every day. Amazed, she asked Tim, “Who has that much garbage?”

She had become a watcher. But she didn’t like it. She would have given anything to go out and shovel her own snow and be otherwise too busy to notice the neighbor’s garbage idiosyncrasies.

And so I think about Mom when I shovel snow. I try to be thankful for what I can still do because someday it might be taken away from me. I try to see snow and work as a blessing and not a necessary evil. And I even try not to go too fast.

Because trust me: that frozen dog poop will kill you.

About Waiting

Posted on by

Christmas was a weird one this year. It started out with one of the kids getting sick the weekend before and then one by one, each of us succumbed to a very nasty and long-lasting flu. Rick got it a couple days before Christmas, I got it Christmas Day and everyone we “celebrated” with that day got mowed down as well.

Sickness is no respecter of persons or calendars.

As much as you can dose yourself with Vitamin C and Oil of Oregano or feed a cold or starve a fever or whatever conventional wisdom would suggest you do, at some point with illness, you just have to buckle in for the ride.

And wait.

There are, of course, tried and true methods of trying to make the waiting more bearable. There’s moaning. There’s napping. There’s trying to decide if you want to eat in spite of your taste buds having gone AWOL. There’s Netflix and now, Disney Plus.

But mostly it’s waiting.

Christmas itself can kind of be a holding pattern. At the end of the year, along comes this day at which point, unless you shop for Christmas gifts at 7-Eleven, you can no longer do anything to prepare. All the flurry of the previous month’s shopping and baking and pre-Christmas revelry comes to a grinding halt and we enter into The Day.

Oh sure, I know it’s not like this for everyone. There’s Christmas travellers and there’s holiday workers like nurses and snow-removal crews that, God bless them, have places to go and things to do. But I’ve always noticed that in general, at Christmas we move into a suspension that if we hold our breath, we can find at least one moment to keep still and enter into the giant snow globe of our memories.

And then after Christmas, the world bounces back into normalcy and it’s over again for another year. The New Year looms, spring-loaded with all it’s potential of days and months “with no mistakes in it yet” as Anne Shirley used to say. We start to make resolutions and workout goals and everyone on the internet wants to sell you their planner that comes complete with unicorns and fairies.

This year sickness has made me press pause a little longer. The snow-globe moments were tinged with the green of sickness this year, but they still happened: all the kids around the table, laughing and playing games when the worst of it let up, going to see the new Star Wars movie. Waiting is hard, but waiting always gives its gifts.

I hope you all had at least one snow globe moment to carry you through to next year.

About Two Christmas Stories: Part Two

Posted on by
Mr. Edwards meets Cowboy Santa. (illustration by David Lockhart)

There is something about finding a familiar story in an anthology that makes me happy. Kinda like, I knew this was good! The second story that I loved from Treasure of Christmas Stories was one called Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus, excerpted, of course, from The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Prairie is actually the second of several books that Wilder wrote about her family experience that bounced between homesteading and moving on in the late 1800s of the American frontier. I loved those earliest books best that showcased littlest Laura with her affinity to her Pa and to always striving for, but never quite matching, perfect older sister Mary’s attitude and behavior. (I won’t touch the un-PC-ness of Wilder’s books as they read in this day and age. For now.)

Ahem. Back to Christmas.

Before Disney Plus and YouTube, before smartphones and separate rooms for every activity, the winter months on the prairie allowed for huge swathes of time for the Ingalls family to sit before a roaring fire in their open-concept home and. . . sew. Or make bullets. Or listen to Pa play the fiddle or read the Bible (on Sundays) and then go to bed.

And so, we find Laura and Mary in the days before Christmas staring out the window at the rain wondering if Christmas will come that year. Because Santa is the one that brings Christmas and snow brings Santa’s reindeer and Santa’s reindeer bring the jolly old elf. And for some reason (probably because of some well-intentioned Ma-and-Pa propaganda) Santa’s reindeer could not come across the roaring creek that was being fed by the constant rain. Like some magical Texas gate.

This is confirmed by Pa when he comes in with a wild turkey for Christmas dinner. The creek is not abating. And here we find out how the propaganda found its footing: Ma and Pa agree that their friend Mr. Edwards, a fellow homesteader who had been invited to Christmas dinner, would not be foolish enough to risk crossing the wild creek for a wild turkey drumstick.

“Of course, that meant that Santa Claus could not come, either.”

And so for a whole page we have to endure the girls going to bed unhappy and Pa so disheartened that he can’t even play the fiddle and Ma suddenly, in spite of all reason, hanging up the girl’s stockings and whispering to a protesting Pa that she could give the girls the last of the white sugar. I repeat: MA HUNG UP ACTUAL SOCKS THAT ACTUAL FEET WENT INTO, PLANNING TO FILL THEM WITH A BAKING STAPLE.

We are so freakin’ spoiled these days.

All that foreshadowing had to lead somewhere and, you guessed it, a cold and wet Mr. Edwards suddenly shows up on their doorstep. When he confesses to Ma and Pa that it wasn’t Christmas dinner that compelled him, but the thought that the little girls would have no gifts on Christmas Day, an eavesdropping-and-supposed-to-be-sleeping Laura sits bolt upright in bed and demands to know if he saw Santa Claus.

While Ma fills the stockings, Mr. Edwards distracts the girls, answering all their questions about him meeting Santa on the streets of Independence, Missouri: how Santa was too old and fat to swim across the river himself, how Santa recognized Edwards from when he was a little boy sleeping in a corn-shuck bed in Tennessee, how Santa led Mr. Edwards over to his pack-mule to retrieve gifts for the girls who lived yonder on the Verdigris River. (Thus solving the snow problem, reasoned Mary.)

Here’s where the real magic happens: as a young girl myself, I would pore over the description of the simple gifts the girls received, as if they were as valuable as those the Magi presented the baby Jesus. A glittering new tin cup. (“Now each had a cup to drink out of.”) A long stick of peppermint candy. (“Sucked…till each stick was sharp-pointed on one end.”) A heart-shaped little cake. (“Made of pure white flour, sweetened with white sugar.”) A shining bright, new penny. (“They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny.”)

And then, the piece de resistance. Mr. Edwards starts pulling sweet potatoes out of his pockets, nine in all. At that point in my life, I had never eaten a sweet potato before (and did not until I learned their magic firsthand at the Christmas table of my husband’s family.) But surely, they must have been better than regular un-sweet potatoes.

The ensuing description of the Christmas meal was not so compelling because I wanted to eat their food. It was because I wanted their delight, their satisfaction, their wonder. And yet it was generated by such simple things like sweet potatoes you can now find in any grocery store and pennies which you could now find discarded on the ground because they aren’t worth anything anymore.

Now I am not particularly fond of camping. Transport me back to Little House on the Prairie and I would probably be more whiny than a rusty door hinge in a haunted house. But I don’t have to go back in time or take a vow of poverty to appreciate the good messages that Laura Ingalls Wilder has sown into her story.

Things are sweeter when they are unexpected and rare.

Holidays are best celebrated with friends and family close.

The simple things really are the best.

I am thankful today for good stories that help me remember this as December rushes onwards to Christmas Day.

About Gratitude: An Old Book Review

Posted on by

When I went looking this week for books about thankfulness, one of the ones that isn’t aimed at children is already on my bookshelf: Ann Voscamp’s One Thousand Gifts. An inaugural attempt by the author, it spent some 65 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Not bad for a “farmer’s wife” (which is basically saying that she’s a farmer, too) from rural Ontario.

Despite the fact that it was wildly popular (apparently), it’s not a real favorite of mine: the author’s breathy, metaphorical style is not one that resonates with me – I do better with a little ironic humor thrown in now and then. Instead, I find myself squinting at the page, trying to decipher the meaning behind “all things wooden-hard giving way to the sky” or “the clay eyes shot red for the sacred seeing.”

What I did find inspiring was the author’s attempt to crawl out from a pit of despair and gloom by engaging in a dare: to make the mother of all gratitude lists. Voscamp kept a gratitude journal, just a simple coil-bound scribbler, open on the counter and moment-by-moment recorded the lovely and memorable “gifts” she witnessed in her everyday life.

243. Clean sheets smelling like wind.

513. Boys jiggling blue Jell-O.

904. First frost’s crunch.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say under the entry ‘Gratitude Journal’: One of the early research studies on gratitude journals…found that “counting one’s blessings” in a journal led to improved psychological and physical functioning. Participants who recorded weekly journals, each consisting of five things they were grateful for, were more optimistic towards the upcoming week and life as a whole, spent more time exercising, and had fewer symptoms of physical illness. Participants who kept daily gratitude journals reported increased overall gratitude, positive affect, enthusiasm, determination, and alertness. They were also more likely to help others and make progress towards their personal goals, compared to those who did not keep gratitude journals. 

Wow! If writing down five things can do that, just think what one thousand could do! Granted, Voscamp’s list wasn’t made all at once, but the practice of gratitude did its trick. Which was to turn her eyes away from the despair in the heart and toward the world around her with the simple physical exercise of writing good things down.

The secret of gratitude is learning this: it’s not about us. Those many things that we can write down in our fancy gratitude journals or old scribblers are not things we are owed or that we deserve. A stream of geese in the air, a child’s sticky kiss, a Thanksgiving plate piled high – these are at the same time both magical and ordinary. Our only duty is to recognize them as the gifts that they are.

About Thanksgiving: It’s a Simple Concept

Posted on by

Thanksgiving happens this weekend. Well, at least in Canada it does. Which lends itself nicely to thinking about turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy and all manner of butter-laden vegetables. Oh, and pie! Don’t forget the pumpkin pie. With real whipped cream. Duh.

Okay, for many of us, some version of this meal encapsulates Thanksgiving. But is it really the point? Isn’t the meal supposed to be a visible (not to mention tasty) expression of the the things we are thankful for?

Ah, of course: thanks-giving.

When I Googled “Books about Thanksgiving”, the usual south-of-the border offerings appeared, pretty much all children’s books, many featuring black-and-white turkeys and Pilgrims in their matching black and white outfits. Or sometimes Pilgrims with a turkey slightly after it lost its outfit. A Canadian Thanksgiving motif doesn’t even register.

When I Googled “Books about Thankfulness”, again it was children’s books that primarily populated the results – indeed a full 9 out of every 10 books on thankfulness is aimed at children. Which makes me think that thankfulness is probably a very simple concept to grasp: even a child can understand it.

When our boys were small lads, we taught them to recite the things they were thankful for during bedtime prayers or around the table. Much like Steve Carell’s character in Anchorman shouting, “I love lamp!”, the boys would swivel their eyes around the room and say, “Thank you for my bed. Thank you for my toys. Thank you for my daddy. “ They were tangible, the things they were thankful for.

It’s a good place to start, with the concrete and the visible. As adults, we can be grateful for the things and people immediately around us. But it’s easy to get caught up with what we don’t have or aren’t satisfied with. Our house has been for sale for nearly four months as we make plans for our next step. It’s a wonderful house to bide our time in but it’s a bit of a bother to keep super tidy for impromptu showings. Plus we really thought we’d be packing up boxes by now.

Years ago I read a poem about being thankful for the opposite of the usual things: heating bills = a warm house, complaining about the government = free speech, clothes that are snug = more than enough to eat. You get the idea.

This weekend I will welcome home my kids and their friends for the weekend. They will sleep in their old rooms and leave empty potato chip bowls on the coffee table. We will spend more on groceries and more time feeding the crowd. We will wonder if we will be living somewhere else next Thanksgiving or if we will find ourselves still here with a ‘For Sale’ sign on the front lawn. It will be noisy and fun and messy and happy and crazy and good – because you can’t really separate those things out with family.

And I will be thankful for it all.