Keeping a Record of Thankfulness

We hear it every year: Thanksgiving is the forgotten holiday. Sandwiched between two holidays where we get stuff, there’s this holiday where we’re supposed to stop and say, “Oh, yeah... Thanks for the stuff.” We pause briefly, not wanting to be too touchy-feely about the whole thankfulness thing before the 5 a.m. sales hit on Black Friday, where we’re ready to go to blows over getting more stuff.

We like stuff at our house, too. I’m pretty much done with my Christmas shopping already, since we have another little stuff-consumer arriving close to the big day. My husband and I have tried to not go crazy with gifts for our kids, knowing that they will value what we teach them to value. But they still pounced on the Toys 'R' Us catalog the day it arrived in the mail, circling and initialing feverishly the things they wanted to “order from Santa.” I have the feeling Christmas morning will be a big disappointment.

In hopes of teaching our kids to be thankful, we try to give Thanksgiving a fair amount of attention. We bake, we dress up to go to grandparents’ houses, and we hold off on trading fall decorations for Christmas ones until after the turkey is gone.

A couple of years ago, though, I decided to start a new tradition to give more pause to our busy life that sometimes seems too focused on acquiring. I bought a small, inexpensive journal at Barnes and Noble, which I keep tucked in a drawer near our front door.

The journal gets pulled out on Thanksgiving Day so that we can document the things that we’re thankful for. I record the kids’ thoughts and then my husband and I each add our own perspective about the blessings of the year.

One thing I anticipate is that it will be very fun as our children grow to look back at the way they will have matured in the things they appreciate. For instance, while so far my young kids’ responses have centered on aunts, uncles and grandparents, they just as seriously told me that they were thankful for “Cheerios with milk” and “funny things like eyeballs.”

Another benefit to keeping this type of journal is that I think it is a very powerful tool when hard times come, to have a record of how they have been resolved in the past. Some of our writings in the journal have included a remembrance of a healing from loss or a way that we were provided for in a tight financial time. If we don’t record those events, it is easy to believe that the next challenge is unique and unsolvable.

My friend Natalie shared with me another idea for celebrating Thanksgiving with a remembrance of thankfulness. She keeps a blessings scrapbook, and each year she tries to have the year’s particular high points documented in the book before Thanksgiving Day arrives so that she and her family can enjoy looking through the book together and remembering all that they have to be thankful for.

Pausing to say thank you is good for kids, but it’s good for us grown-ups, too. Sometimes when my mother-in-law asks for a few ideas for Christmas shortly after Thanksgiving, I struggle to come up with one thing I’d like to have. But by the end of the frenzied season I’m on a roll and having received some beautiful gifts, I can think of lots of other things I “need.”

Stopping to say thanks in a meaningful way seems to help with how we perceive our lot in life. We go from looking at what we don’t have yet, to what we do have already, and everything we thought we needed to be happy seems less necessary.