By Heather Melton (she/her), UTO Staff Officer
I once had someone tell me that everyone has one Gospel message on their heart that they tend to preach over and over again, until a new message calls them and takes root in its place. I’m sure the parishes I served prior to this call could tell you what my one sermon is, as could those who have accompanied me on this journey at UTO: putting the “thanks” back into Thanksgiving. This November, this message continues to resonate deeply in my heart and in my own home.
One of the things that I have tried to foster in our home is the importance of one holiday at a time. When the twins were little, this was built out of a hope of teaching them the power of being present in a world filled with distractions. We live in a time when before Halloween even ends, Christmas items are available in stores. Maybe it was always like this, but it makes me sad that November and Thanksgiving get lost between the two.
In our house, we use November to be intentional about gratitude, and we’ve added all those resources onto the website for you to use at home too! We’ve built UTO turkey boxes and giant gratitude turkeys who receive a feather each day with something we are grateful for written on it, and we’ve played with gratitude dice at dinner. We’ve also amassed fall decorations so that when we take down the Halloween ones, we put up turkeys and pumpkins. One of my favorite traditions each year is, in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, we build our own Macy’s parade floats using helium balloons and craft supplies. Just like in the Macy’s parade, sometimes they float and sometimes they get dragged, but the show always goes on.
Thanksgiving is not without its problems (and we have great resources on our website to help talk to young people about it or to learn about it yourself), but the essence of it is lovely. Perhaps it’s because I am a big fan of “Peanuts,” but for me, Thanksgiving should look a bit like Charlie Brown and his friends gathered around a ping-pong table with popcorn, toast, and jellybeans, before loading up the car to descend on his grandmother’s condo. Those images from my childhood are a reminder that the gifts we bring are enough and there’s always enough if we share. This is the core of the work we do at UTO: We try to help ourselves and others remember that we are enough. This year, our grant theme builds upon this idea by using a play on the word “gift” that we hear each Sunday at church—we are the gifts of God for the people of God. Not only are we enough, but we have enough to help others.
November gives us a chance to slow down and notice the “gifts” in our lives, letting them know they are important to us. This month, since my kiddos are getting older, we’re not building a giant turkey or making a cornucopia of gratitude-marked vegetables (I thought that was particularly fun), but we’re sending short notes of thanks to the people we love. We’ve stocked up on postcards and postcard stamps, and we’ll mail one a day from Nov. 1 until Nov. 29 as a way of saying thank you to the people in our lives who share their gifts with us. Then on Nov. 30, we’ll give thanks for all of them and for the gifts we are in the world by making a thank offering to UTO.
Not interested in writing 29 thank-you notes yourself? Don’t worry, I can do it for you. If you donate online, you can have me send cards in the mail for you. Simply put the person’s name and address in the comments (or all 29 of them), and I’ll get them printed and sent on your behalf. As an aside, you can do this year-round, but it might be especially meaningful as you hold the space between Halloween and Christmas and fill it with gratitude.
