A lot of people want to speed headlong into the Christmas season.  Walgreens begins clearing space for lights and decorations the day after Halloween.  O’Hare Airport hung their ornaments midway through the month, despite the fact that Thanksgiving provides their heaviest travel weekend.  We often treat Thanksgiving like an anonymous town along a major road; speeding by on our way to someplace better…

But Thanksgiving does matter and means something.  It’s nice to remember the first settlers on this country, Myles Standish and the other illegal immigrants of the early seventeenth century.  But it’s better still to stop and think of our lives from a perspective of appreciation.  We don’t do that a lot–who has the time?  Still, giving thanks demonstrates some of the best of our humanity; a simultaneous nobility and vulnerability.

So today I give thanks for an ever-challenging job where I’m privileged to work beside fascinating people.  I give thanks for a family that’s loving, rewarding, and dependably hilarious.  And I give thanks for living in a country where–no matter how we may diminish it–still deems it worthwhile to stop everything once a year in order to celebrate and appreciate life.  That’s pretty awesome.

Happy Thanksgiving!

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79