Commentary: The gift of gratitude

Don’t look past the healing spirit of Thanksgiving

Thankfulness will be the order of the day Thursday. Are you ready?

Or have you decided to skip the thankfulness and go straight into the covetousness.

Hey, I'm not casting any stones. I started my Christmas wish list months ago because I know, when I'm together with my extended family on Thanksgiving Day, my brothers and mom and dad will ask the question: So, what do you want for Christmas? Thankfully, we gave up the full-scale family gift exchanges years ago, opting for the cost-limiting effect of the annual Christmas name-drawing.

September and October have become the pre-season for the Christmas retail sales pitch, prepping consumers for the annual campaign to separate them from their money. That's not an indictment. Like the band Europe singing "The Final Countdown," it's what they do. (Thanks, Geico) It keeps the economy churning along.

My thought process isn't so much about what retailers do, but about what we individually and collectively do in response.

It matters not one iota to me whether Starbucks has a snowflake or Santa Claus or a nativity scene on its red cups. For retailers, it's about sales. It's not about faith. If a popular purveyor of caffeine wants to go neutral on the whole Christmas motif, it doesn't make me fidgety in the least. Shop there or don't. If you want to celebrate the birth of the Christian Savior, find a church and join brothers and sisters in a heartfelt "Oh Holy Night." A lot of churches serve coffee, too. And it's usually free.

Retailers need to move product, not hearts and souls. Whatever person raised the ruckus about the design of a coffee cup needs to ponder whether convincing a national chain to promote Jesus and java does anything to advance the message of Christianity's central figure.

But there I go, jumping ahead to Christmas when Thanksgiving hasn't even passed. Maybe it's because one of the radio stations here in Northwest Arkansas started playing Christmas music weeks ago and stores are chock full of Christmas lights, ornaments and trees. My mailbox has been getting Christmas-themed ads for a while, too.

Or it could be a popular electronics retailer's commercial showing a shopper scoring in his search for gifts, fist-bumping a salesperson. An announcer dramatically explains "When you give tech, people won't just love it. They'll love you." I wonder how much one has to spend to earn that love?

Surely taking its inspiration from the biblical message of the birth of Christ, the commercial finishes with those traditional words of Yuletide encouragement, "Win the holidays."

Win the holidays? Who's keeping score? Is Christmas just the Super Bowl of acquiring stuff?

Well, in general, the answer is yes. As columnist Art Hobson reminded us last week, a Pew Research Center study shows a decline in the number of Americans professing an affiliation with a religious denomination. In that environment, isn't it more likely than not that the Christmas holiday's connection to faith would also be diminished?

While Art finds good news in the trend, I'm less than gleeful. Christmas without faith is just a winter shopping spree. What, really, is the point of that?

If it's a reality that more Americans every year are detaching Christmas from the birth of a God-sent messiah, perhaps we need to rethink this cultural shift toward skipping over Thanksgiving and heading right into the annual shopping frenzy. Whether based in faith or not, gratitude is a necessary component of individual and collective well-being. If we as a people lose our capacity for gratitude, the road ahead is indeed rocky.

Does the abundance that surrounds us in the United States make it harder to express simple gratitude? It's certainly easy to take it for granted. If you need help being grateful this week, just consider what your life would be like at this very moment if you were, say, a Syrian.

I long for my kids to grow their capacity to give thanks for who they are, what they have and, yes, the blessings God has delivered in our lives, because gratitude is at the core of so much that is good. Ingratitude drains us of joy.

Maybe Thursday, not Black Friday, should be emphasized as the kickoff to the holiday season because of its encouragement to realize how much we have to be thankful for. For all of us, there's freedom made possible by a great nation. For most, there's gainful employment. For every one reading this, there's the fact we're alive with an opportunity to live another day.

I look forward to a prayer of gratitude on Thanksgiving Day, but that's not necessarily everyone's cup of joe. I would suggest, however, that it matters less what's on the cup than realizing how full our cups are. Anyone who seeks out a sense of thankfulness Thursday, and every day, will find a fuller sense of satisfaction and contentment. I pray we can all find it.

Commentary on 11/23/2015

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