After sharing a great meal with my family on Thanksgiving Day, I sat out by the fire on our back patio, thinking of what I was grateful for this year. I pondered the fact that our giving of thanks quickly becomes just the prelude to the extremely commercial shopping experience of our modern holiday season.
I pulled out the video camera and caught the essence of my thoughts to share with you here. In a nutshell, we here in the U.S. live by pretty high standards compared to a lot of the world, and I think we would all benefit by remembering that and being grateful for what we have.
Too often we are focused on stuff, and yet that stuff is just that: stuff. It won’t make us happier, it won’t make us more successful, and it won’t make us better husbands, wives, or parents. Let’s give thanks this holiday season for what we already enjoy: our family, our friends, our community, and the fact that our basic needs are always met.
Image: k4dordy at Flickr
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I completely agree that we should really take a look at what this holiday season is really about. Spending time with family and building memories is far better that buying “stuff”. Last year we started a no gift xmas for the adults and a 1 gift rule for kids. We replaced that tradition with a cookie making event and what a difference it makes. We want to raise our daughter with this philosophy throughout the year and are brainstorming ways to kick-off her 1st birthday with a similar philosophy!
The no-gift and 1 gift rule sound great – we did something similar one year as well, and now we try to keep it very simple.
One really sees the point of your message when you get ready to move to a new house – everyone collects so much stuff that we just put away in corners and don’t even remember we have. I feel a little better about it each time we bring several bags to Goodwill, but it still seems like an endless stream of stuff.
Earth Friendly Goodies´s last blog ..Hey, You Put Your Beer on My Village People!
Yes, we just moved recently, and think we could have gotten rid of so much more, even though at the time we had a hard time letting go.
Amen Brother. Amen.
Excellent thoughts, thanks for sharing them.