Happy Celebratesgiving!
Hello you jingle bell.
Happy Canadian thanksgiving everyone! It's that special time of year when the trees are festooned in their most outlandish golds and crimsons, when you can bake in the sun and freeze in the shade all in the same day, and when we come together to spend some cinnamon-scented communal time with family and friends.
Traditionally, tis the season for giving thanks-- or to put it in more modern parlance-- tis the season for being grateful. Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to express appreciation for what one has, and allows for an affirmation of both the goodness that we enjoy in our lives, and that this goodness comes from outside of ourselves. The power of gratefulness has become better documented lately, and we know a lot more about the many benefits of gratitude and how gratitude can even rewire our brains.
So in short, gratitude is a wonderful thing! Please practice with wild and reckless abandon this thanksgiving!
Naturally, I have been thinking this week about thankfulness; but I have also been thinking about the importance of celebration, and how to actually give form and function to the gratitude we have for the good things in our lives.
In my immediate family, there are two birthdays that always fall around thanksgiving (my sister and my father), and so there has always been a touch of celebration to our family thanksgiving rituals. And this year is extra exciting as they are both marking milestone birthdays. HAPPY BIRTHDAY LEAH AND DAD!!! So maybe this is the milestone-marking talking, but...
It is true that being grateful affords us the opportunity to appreciate all that we have in the present moment, and to acknowledge the goodness that comes from outside ourselves. And don't get me wrong: I love this thought exercise and the perspective that comes from it.
But when it comes to being thankful this time of year, I don't just want to feel grateful for the goodness-- I want to CELEBRATE the goodness!
Perhaps this sounds like semantics-- and maybe it is for some of you. But I experience a real difference between feeling grateful and celebrating the things I am grateful for. And I want to bring more of this celebrating into the world.
To me, celebration is like gratefulness come to life. Celebration is meeting the goodness you are grateful for with more goodness. It is an amplification of the good, a jubilee of awesomeness, and a deliberate moment to commune with the beauty in each other and the world around us. It can come in the form of grateful words spoken aloud; it can come in the form of an action taken inspired by/in honor of someone else's goodness in your life; it can be represented by a thing that you make for and/or give to another person; it can be something as simple as a look or kind touch; it can be as bold as a public declaration to inspire others with the goodness you experience. Or something else entirely. I would love to hear your experiences of celebration!
So gentle readers, I would like to wish you a Happy Celebratesgiving! May you find much to be grateful for this weekend (and always), and may you also celebrate the goodness you find with earnest enthusiasm and personal panache!
But wait! Is all this talk of celebration a bit too much of a commitment on a sunny Sunday morning? I know it is Sunday the 13th and not Friday the 13th, but please enjoy this article about how the patriarchy stole Friday the 13th from women and made it evil.
Still too much realness? Then check out this mezmerizing post of a dreaming octopus
From one gratitude-filled person to another, I am glad that we can celebrate goodness together. I hope you enjoyed this dispatch, and have a thankfulness-filled week!
Until next Sunday,
The Earnest Platypus