TMI a little place to whine

Now that it's over I think I've decided that we've got Thanksgiving all wrong.

It's not about buying MORE food, it's about being thankful for the food that you have.

So maybe we should be promoting a day where we all look inside our cupboards and cabinets and pantries and refrigerators and make a meal of what we have. Then gather around as a family giving thanks for the blessings we have received and the goodness our hard work has provided us with throughout the year.

Be thankful for hamburger helper, or spaghetti and meat sauce or chicken wings and mac and cheese.

We don't need to spend $150 for one meal to prove we are thankful. We should just be thankful for what we have, because what we do have we have in abundance.

Black Friday?

The premier shopping day of the Christmas season.

And the reason it's black? Because retailers have to sell, sell, sell and sell some more or they won't be "in the black" for the year if they don't make a good showing at Christmas sales.

Christmas has been turned into an economic event. Make people want to spend money. Make them feel guilty if they don't spend or over spend.

And in the White House christmas has become a cause for patriots to rally behind the flag of retail sales which will boost the economy.

Yesterday was gluttony.

Today kicks off the season to be greedy.

Fa la la la la.

We are supposed to be thankful today for all we have received, and I truely am. Are you?

I am thankful for the help of friends and parishioners to feed more than 150 families who had nothing to celebrate with. I am thankful for those who gave of their time and treasure to make other people understand that Godhasn't forgotten them or their needs.

Special thanks for Benjamin whose mother Caroline , a dear friend, drove far from his own neighborhood so they could help at a church to which he and his family do not attend. God will bless him and his family especially for his willingness to help others in need.

But on another hand...

Some tv announcer/newscaster went on last night saying that Thanksgiving was the only national holiday that was not commercialized.

NOT commercialized?

Then what do you call the endless commercials for food and food stores and dessert items that we've been blasted with since Halloween?

As much as Christmas has become a holiday of greed and gimme, gimme, gimme Thanksgiving has become the holiday of nationally sanctioned gluttony.

And yet people in the United States, maybe in your own neighborhood, go hungry.

Happy Thanksgiving

Do you ever wonder how many Americans have two refrigerators?

Two.

When so many have none, others - myself included - have two. Why? To hold the stuff we can't fit into the main fridge. Ours is in the laundry room but many people have it in the basement or the garage.


Mine holds the extra juices, and the back up milk, and eggs. It also takes the beer and cold soda.

It holds the "extra" stuff we all buy for Thanksgiving, the desserts, the pickels and extra stuff like cranberry sauce, and later the leftovers that we can't stuff into the kitchen fridge.

And yet, there are families who have one refrigerator and can't even fill it with basic food on a daily basis.

Maybe because I see more people in need during Thanksgiving I start to appreciate what I have in that extra refrigerator. I take my lunch to work, usually from the stuff in the laundry room fridge, and instead of being annoyed that's it's not what I feel like eating I find myself saying a prayer to thank God that I have it.

I've decided that there are two things that are responsible for the condition of the world as we know it: Republicans and Advertising.

Advertising makes people buy things they didn't know existed because they are told how much they NEED it to live a good and clean life. Consequently, we have trashed the world buying useless things we really could ahve lived quite successfully without.

Republicans makes people think that advertising is fueling the economy, which after all is the most important thing here in America - constitution and bill of rights be damned.

So, it's a self fullfilling prophecy of economic boom and planetary destruction but we are sold a bill of goods by advertisers who tell us that this is a GOOD thing.

As I said, there are 2 things responsible for the condition of the world, but make that 3 - to complete the cycle one needs a willingly gullible audience.

It never ceases to amaze me that things we take for granted here in America are so prized by new immigrants.

We went to help a Cuban woman, who had come to the US legally, through the Cuban lottery, with her husband and 2 children. He husband then abandoned her to marry another "older" woman with lots of money.

So she called the church for help.

We went to visit her. She apoligized for not speaking English well, but she spoke very well for someone who had only been here over a year. We discussed her troubles, gave her some phone numbers to call for help and gave her a box of groceries from the church pantry. You know, staples, and canned goods. As she looked through the box a big smile came across her face. There was a bottle of cooking oil. She hugged it to her. Her 7 year old son saw a can of sardines and jumped - literally and clapped his hands. The 6 year old daughter saw a box of frosted mini wheat cereal and rolled her eyes in anticipation of eating it.

I keep thinking of how greatful they were for something we might overlook in our own daily life, or something we might dismiss as "nothing good to eat."

As I prepared my own dinner this evening I cleared the counter of some gerrn pepper seeds - ready to toss them in the garbage. Then I remembered that family, and many others like them, who would hoard those seeds so they could grow plants for their own consumption next season.

And I wonder, what has America so uncaring.