Thanksgiving 2025: Thanks-Living

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On Thanksgiving 2025 we find ourselves just shy of a quarter of the way into the Twenty-First Century. What visions the new century inspired in me as a boy in the 1960s.

Thanksgiving 2025: Thanks-Living

It’s hard to believe 2025 is almost over. We are now a quarter of the way through the 21st century, a time that filled my 60s boyhood with wonder. The Star Trek communicator has manifested as the mobile phone, but the Star Trek tricorder, the Jetsons flying car, and interplanetary travel have yet to materialize. Robert Heinlein wrote “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” in 1966 describing a Lunar colony with an intelligent supercomputer managing the infrastructure. It was set in 2075, so we still have 50 years to go for that may come to pass. Ray Bradbury wrote “There will Come Soft Rains” in 1950 as a chapter in “The Martian Chronicles.” It’s an elegy for a family incinerated in a nuclear holocaust in 2026, told from the perspective of an intelligent house that does not realize the family has perished. When I read it in the 1960s, it encouraged me to count my blessings. So far, nuclear war has been a disaster averted, something to give thanks for.

“Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.”
William Arthur Ward

We had a three smaller Thanksgiving dinners this week with different extended family members as everyone’s schedules permitted. I like Ward’s suggestion to allow gratitude to transform routine jobs and ordinary opportunities into blessings.

“To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.”
Victor Hugo

Thanks-LivingI think Hugo gets it exactly right. Thanks and gratitude finds it way to the right play if we weave it into our daily actions.

Then, brethren, we ought to be always thanks-living. I think that is a better thing than thanksgiving: thanks-living. How is this to be done? By a general cheerfulness of manner, by an obedience to the command of Him by whose mercy we live, by a perpetual, constant, delighting ourselves in the Lord, and submission of our desires to His mind.
Charles Spurgeon in Sermon 3476 on Sunday March 5th, 1871.

I was unfamiliar with Spurgeon’s coinage of “thanks-living” but it captures a useful plan for managing your life.

“There lay Thorin Oakenshield with many wounds, his rent armor and notched axe were cast upon the floor. He looked up as Bilbo came beside him.

“Farewell, good thief,” he said. “I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed. Since I leave now all gold and silver, and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship from you.”

Bilbo knelt on one knee filled with sorrow. “Farewell, King under the Mountain!” he said. “This is a bitter adventure, if it must end so; and not a mountain of gold can amend it. Yet I am glad that I have shared in your perils, that has been more than any Baggins deserves.”

“No!” said Thorin. “There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!”

J. R. R. Tolkein in “The Hobbit.”

I put “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world,” because it’s the only portion of Thorin Oakenshield’s deathbed scene in “The Hobbit” that gets quoted. But I think this excerpt provides more context. I like how he sees Bilbo Baggins as a blend of courage and wisdom, two character traits that are foundational and mutually reinforcing. It’s a blend I aspire to.

“Wherever you are, you could celebrate Thanksgiving today.

Not the Thanksgiving of a bountiful harvest before the long winter, the holiday of pilgrims and pie. That’s a holiday of scarcity averted. A modern Thanksgiving would celebrate two things:

  1. The people in our lives who give us the support and love we need to make a difference.
  2. The opportunity to build something bigger than ourselves, something worth contributing. The ability to make connections, to lend a hand, to invent and create.”

Seth Godin in “A Modern Thanksgiving” (Nov-25-2010)

It’s also OK to look back and celebrate disaster and scarcity averted.

Other Thanksgiving Posts

Photo Credit: Steve Houston who captioned it “With 60% of the leaf cover lost, the raised crest signals alert status required to survive the season.”

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