Best Day

This is the Best Day! Thanksgiving in adulthood has quietly become my favorite holiday. Christmas is a better party and it might be more irreplaceable. Easter is sublime but more a feast (religious, that is) than a holiday.

Thanksgiving comes though after the exertions of early Fall. It's a welcome rest in the way that those other two holidays never are. (You can see we do it quietly at our house; no dramatic, huge spreads. I'm not that much of a cook that I invite the whole neighborhood over!)

It's secular religion-lite too. You couldn't have it without the impulse of Christianity and the peculiar weather and early history of the United States, and it suits us. Autumn is a Northern hemisphere glory and perhaps more in the maple forests of the new world than in the old.

It makes sense to celebrate before the hard winter sets in, and there's precious little animism abroad in the U.S.. We don't set bon-fires to appease dark spirits that we don't entirely believe in but we do pause before the onset of that winter, bigger than we are, that reminds us of our status on earth as invited guests.

I hope we continue to remember. We have often been greedy or unruly guests, ruining what we touch. That's not okay. I hope we remember, and I sense, each Thanksgiving, that most of us do and for that I am grateful.

So on this day, fractious as I often am at other times, I feel comfortable and at home, where I am, a member of the group.