Giving Thanks

 

 

A sunrise from last week.

My November Guest
Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

November is, to me, one of the bleakest months of the year (February is the bleakest). Though not officially winter yet, November behaves like it is anyway. The weather seems especially dismal with summer and autumn still so fresh in my memory. November’s snows are not such pretty snows. They are usually wet and sloppy. They come for a day or two then melt to mud. It is the month when the days are more dark than light and the cold starts to settle in for the long, long wait until spring. The only thing that redeems the month comes at its end with the celebration of Thanksgiving.

I love Thanksgiving. As the years go on, I think the reason for the feast is fading. It has been reduced to the Pre-Christmas Kick-Off. For a lot of people it’s a day for overeating and watching football and the excitement of Pre-Black Friday Christmas Shopping. I’ve never watched football and in its present overly political posturing, I never will. I do not like to shop, so all that hoopla has no appeal for me. I am a fan of the feast, but now with dietary concerns weighing on me (literally), I have to be careful of what and how much I eat, so that puts a damper on that. With all of those aspects of the holiday stripped away, I find my focus settles more on the reason for the celebration.

Every year I like to prepare for Thanksgiving by making a list, sometimes on paper but usually mentally, of things I’m thankful for. This year I will be following Pres. Nelson’s request and posting something I am thankful for every day between now and Thanksgiving on my facebook account (#GiveThanks). I have an amazing number of things I’m thankful for. [As an aside, I’d like to clarify a bit of semantics. I hear more and more people saying that they are “thankful and grateful” for this or that. They seem to assign some convoluted difference in meaning between the two words. But according to every dictionary and thesaurus I own, the words are synonymous and the redundancy of saying “thankful and grateful” annoys me.]

As Thanksgiving approaches, I like to review its history from the harvest feast the Pilgrim colonists held in 1621 to its establishment as a national holiday in 1863 and beyond. The Pilgrims (as we call them – they did not refer to themselves as that, in fact they weren’t given that name until around 1840), arrived at Cape Cod on the coast of what would become Massachusetts on November 10, 1620. This year was the 400th anniversary of that momentous event. Oddly, I didn’t see anything about it in the oh-so-reliable Media (read that sarcastically), which has kept our attentions focused on other, seemingly more important present day events. And the attempts by the historical revisionists and the cancel culture to malign the Pilgrims and demolish their achievements hasn’t helped. Celebrations of key events and people in the founding of our nation have fallen out of favor in our society presently. Too many have been taught and now believe that the Pilgrims were nothing more than a bunch of Self-serving White European Genocidal Religious Bigots. Those who believe this are wrong.

 

There is a great book that I’ve read several times, Saints and Strangers by George F. Willison (published in 1945) that does a great job of giving the history of the Pilgrims. (It’s full title is Saints and Strangers: Being the Lives of the Pilgrim Fathers & Their Families, with Their Friends & Foes; & an Account of Their Posthumous Wanderings in Limbo, Their Final Resurrection & Rise to Glory, & the Strange Pilgrimages of Plymouth Rock.) It had been a few years since I last read it, so last week I set aside the book I was reading and now I’m reading and enjoying it again. Here are a few good quotes from the book:

“It is about time, I think, that the Pilgrims were allowed to tell their own story–-and, so far as it can be readily and readably managed, in their own words. They were always quite able to speak for themselves, and never had any diffidence in doing so. They wrote marvelous letters, as fresh and crisp today as when penned three centuries ago. Though relatively few, their chronicles are remarkably rich in the very stuff of human life. They will stand forever as a bright clear mirror of all the hopes and fears that lie closest to men’s hearts.”

“They were men–-and women, too–-of courage and conviction, strong and positive in their attitudes, prepared to sacrifice much for their principles, even their very lives.”

“The Pilgrims played a vital part–-and consciously so–-in that great conflict of spiritual and material forces which so decisively shaped the world as we know it today. That conflict centered on the fiercely contested right to freedom of conscience, merely one aspect of the still larger right to freedom of thought and speech. Stripped of theological trimmings, the issue as posed in the Pilgrims’ day was this: Was it right for the State to demand uniformity of belief?”

Somehow, it seems that in forgetting the Pilgrims and their struggle with this conflict, forgetting what they strove for and achieved, we’ve come full circle and are now grappling again with State and Media attempts to create and enforce uniformity of belief. If you want to get a deeper understanding and appreciation for who the Pilgrims were and what they accomplished, I recommend reading Saints and Strangers.

My interest in the Pilgrims began when I was ten years old and my mother, who was doing a lot of genealogical research at the time, sent me to school at Thanksgiving time with a Show and Tell note explaining that I was the 11th great-grandson of Stephen Hopkins, who was a passenger on the Mayflower. Since then, through my own research, I’ve discovered that my father’s ancestors, all of them New Englanders, go back on several lines to those early Plymouth colonists. In addition to Stephen Hopkins (my 11th great-grandfather) and his daughter Constance (my 10th great-grandmother), I also descend from Richard Warren (my 10th great-grandfather), and Margaret Winslow (my 11th great-grandmother) who were on the Mayflower and Robert Hicks (my 11th great-grandfather) who arrived aboard the ship Fortune in 1621, and Edward Bangs, Nicholas Snow, Elizabeth Walker Warren (all my 10th great-grandparents) and her daughter Elizabeth Warren (my 9th great-grandmother) who arrived on the ship Anne in 1623. I realize that there are millions of people in the United States who are also descendants of these people, so I’m not really all that special, but I have had a keen interest in them for so much of my life that I feel close to them. I admire them for their strength and courage and I look forward to meeting them all someday.

Two of my ancestors signed this.

We had snow at the beginning of the week. It was cold enough that it sat on the ground until Friday when the temperature finally rose enough to melt it. I wasn’t in school on Friday and, knowing it would be the best day of the week, I took advantage of the relative warmth to tackle a few last outdoor projects. The first ones were down at the barn. We had some very strong winds two weeks ago that bent the fence along the front of the chicken yard. I drove in some new fence poles and straightened and reinforced the fence. It’s cold enough now that chickens’ waterers have begun icing up, so I ran an electric cord down to the barn and set up their heated waterers. The rain barrel is also freezing more now, but so far the ice has been thin enough that I can break it and get water. When the ice gets too thick to break, I’ll empty the barrel and store it. Then I’ll have to carry water down from the house every day, so I will keep the barrel going for as long as I can.

 

Snow last week out front.

Snow last week out back.

The fence before.

The fence after.

Heated waterers.

The second project was at the house. Miriam and I took down the old rain gutters on the upper eaves of the house. They were not really working anymore and with the way the water drains onto the new porch roof, they were no longer necessary. Taking them down required going up a ladder, which is terrifying to me, so Miriam did most of the work while I supervised from below. While she was up there, she put up more Christmas lights.

 

Miriam working on the gutters and lights.

 

We’d planned to go down to the Thayns’ for the weekend, but decided at the last minute not to. Instead we spent the day on Saturday working at this and that around the house. This weekend was our Stake Conference and there were two meetings yesterday evening that we viewed remotely. Today was an Area Conference broadcast that we watched. Pres. Henry B. Eyring of the First Presidency and Elder Ulisses Soares of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and others spoke. It was good to hear their messages.

Tosh has been here all week working. He left early this morning to go home. Miriam also left this morning to go down to the Thayn’s and then travel on tomorrow to her cousin Chase’s house for Thanksgiving. She’ll be home again on December 1st. I’ll miss her while she’s gone. It snowed again this morning, but just a light dusting. This will be a short week at school – just Monday and Tuesday and a half day on Wednesday. Then we’re out until December 1st. Our Thanksgiving celebration here will be small this year – just Stacey, Hannah, me, and Kurt and Julie. We’re holding the feast at the Shillig’s house. It’s been several years since the Shilligs were here for the holidays. I’m glad they’re here. I hope you all have a great celebration and that your lives are full of many things to be thankful for.

 

The beaver pond at sunrise.

Dan