We all know it’s not about the turkey. Thanksgiving is about family, friends, and about counting our blessings: a roof over our head, health, food on the table (and pumpkin pie too), people who care about us, rain after a long hot summer… Thanksgiving offers us a chance to look for the many things we take for granted every day and see them in a different light. It also gives us a chance to look, and look again, for the hidden blessings in the things we silently begrudge: the disgruntled neighbor, the teenage kid who bewilders his parents with alternating demands for closeness (can you drive me to my friend’s house?) and separation, the distant father, the critical mother, the body that seems to fail us when we fall ill or try to be with child.

Giving thanks to these unwelcome encounters calls for careful discernment. We make an effort to see what is causing our dislike or pain. The disgruntled neighbor knows (likely unknowingly) how to draw out our insecurity, the teenage boy our fear of abandonment, the critical parent and non-compliant body our experience of inadequacy. The proof is in the pudding.

When we see more clearly what it is we are reacting to, we can decide what to do next. We can appreciate our insecurity, abandonment fears, inadequacy, and politely decline to feed them. Not everything that’s laid out one the Thanksgiving table needs to be sampled. Who says I have to eat the candied yams only because my mother makes them every year? Thanks, but no thanks.

Please pass the gravy.