11.28- Thanksgiving Day 2019

11.28-

Thanksgiving Day 2019

You don’t have to have riches to have a wonderful Thanksgiving day. Hard times seem to make the memory richer. My mother’s book has a story which stood out to her and stands out to me. She told about the joy of Thanksgiving with her family and aunts and uncles whom she rarely got to visit with because they lived in Missouri. We were blessed to be raised with our cousins and saw most of them every week at school and church. On holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas we still got together with some of them and had a great holiday together.

Hard times Thanksgivings do make a special memory. We lived in Denver for 33 years and most of those years we did not get to come home to Texas, but our Colorado friends became our family during the holidays especially. They treated us like family and loved us like family and still do.
We enjoyed inviting people over for Thanksgiving who had experienced hard times. We had a couple of mothers with us who were single parent moms who had lost a child in their teens. What a gathering to remind us to be thankful for our teen children being alive. That is a good thing when at times you might feel like your teens are driving you crazy. Look around the Thanksgiving table and a youth is not there. Then a few years and another teen who had been at our Thanksgiving left this earth, too early from our perspective. If you have your children with you then you have something to be thankful for.

Hard times for our farm family included not making enough in our cotton crop to pay off all the bills it took to raise the crop. Then at the end of the season we would do something called “scrapin”. The cotton stripper would come in and get most of the cotton, but during lean times you would go out in the field and pick up loose cotton. One Thanksgiving we had this as our work. Mother fixed a big Thanksgiving lunch and had a white table cloth to lay out under the cotton wagon. She put the food out and it included one of my favorite dishes, asparagus. I got a big mouthful and had to sneeze and the food went all over the place.

Thanksgiving has sweet memories. Today Amy called us from Atlanta and will be here for Christmas, Lord willing, and Jeff and Donna will be here later. I hope you are filled with gratefulness this year on this special day. I am thankful for the blessing of living long enough to see my children grow up and now my grandsons, age 18 and 21.

God is good.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of You.
Larry Wishard
11.28.19

Psalm 128.

⁵ The Lord bless you from Zion,
And may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life.
⁶ Indeed, may you see your children’s children.
Peace be upon Israel!