The Reasons I Love Thanksgiving

We are coming up on my all time favorite holiday! I love Thanksgiving! For your reading enjoyment, I thought I'd share the reasons why this day ranks #1 among holidays for me.

1. It's the one holiday when we give back to God without expecting anything in return. Everything is directed to God, not us. We give thanks and that's the whole reason for celebrating. And it's reason enough!

2. Thanksgiving is my crowning glory in the cooking department. I'm no domestic goddess and I don't particularly care for cooking, but somehow I've managed to master the traditional Thanksgiving meal. My turkey is moist and tender and oh so tasty. I can whip up some mouth-watering gravy. I can even make a mean dressing and side dishes and several yuuuuummmmmy desserts. Unfortunately, I rarely get to cook the actual Thanksgiving meal at our house because we're often celebrating elsewhere, but I usually manage to sneak it in sometime in the fall even if it's not on the holiday itself.

3.The parades. I have always loved watching the parades on Thanksgiving morning. One of my dreams in life is to actually attend the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade one year (preferrably a year when the weather is mild).

4. I feel like we have a Thanksgiving family. My heritage has a lot of Cherokee Indian while my husband has a lot of English/Scottish blood. Combined, we're the traditional Thanksgiving clan.

5. It's not surrounded in hype. Materialism dominates Christmas these days. Most stores go straight from Halloween costumes to Christmas decor with no pause for anything related to Thanksgiving. Although, I did notice more Thanksgiving supplies than ever this year. I suppose giving thanks doesn't earn them much money. Good! I hope it never becomes one of those hyper holidays where the true meaning gets totally lost in commercialism.

6. Gathering with family and friends. It's refreshing to see people we don't see all the time and to come together to share a day of rest and fun.

7. You don't have to stick to your diet on Thanksgiving. I know all those diet magazines tell you do stick with your plan, but I say throw it to the wind for a day. Even if you haven't been sticking to it for months and you're way off course. Not that anyone I know falls into that category, I'm just saying... But Thanksgiving is definitely not the time to try to walk by an abundantly laden table and "be good". No way. Chow, people, before the dieting days of January roll around!

8. It's a great day to do all of those crafty autumn/winter things that I never get to do at other times of the year. At our house we also like to dig out the giant puzzles. During the holdiay and winter season, we often have a partially completed puzzle on a card table that we work on in spurts as we have time. It's sort of a tradition, I suppose.

I feel like I'm getting in the holiday spirit already!