Well, another Thanksgiving is in the books. The company’s gone, the fall decorations are put away, and the turkey … let’s just say it will be part of a variety of reimagined meals for a while.
For many of us, our attention now turns to the season of gift-giving. Everywhere we turn, we’re pressured to spend more than we should and buy what we don’t need, even if that means charging it to a credit card we don’t have a plan to pay off. Wasn’t it just Thursday we sat around a table with loved ones, sharing what we’re thankful for?
It’s easy to point a finger at our consumer capitalist culture and the commercialization of Christmas as the reason for such a hard shift to materialistic thinking. In commercials, companies change the words of sacred holiday hymns to highlight whatever new product they want us to buy. When that ideology is in the air, it’s hard not to breathe it in. That said, I wonder if a more significant contributing factor to this season is the reality that we don’t understand gratitude — not really, anyway.
The Rev. Kali Cawthon-Freels
Part of the problem may be the fact that our cultural understanding of Thanksgiving is built on a fantasy. We paint these idyllic pictures of members of the Wampanoag Nation and European pilgrims getting along without any tension. We gloss over the violence and greed brought by European colonizers and how they instigated the destruction that would ultimately lead to the Trail of Tears. We overlook the reasons why Native American advocacy groups in 1970 declared Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning, remembering the genocide of their people.
How can we build a holiday about real gratitude on a foundation of lies? No wonder we only allow gratitude to be a small blip in our routine of buy, spend and consume.
Because we’ve sanitized this history, we’ve missed one of the most important lessons the Native American culture has to teach. Gratitude isn’t a thing you do or an emotion you feel. Gratitude is a way of being. It’s a rhythm through which you live your life. It’s a constant state of reciprocity that reminds you of your connectedness to all living things.
The Wampanoag Nation knew these truths when the pilgrims landed in the 1600s. I wonder how different the culture of the United States would be if my ancestors had listened and learned, rather than denied and destroyed. Perhaps we’d be a nation that truly understood gratitude to be the foundation on which a society that celebrates difference succeeds.
As people of faith, gratitude should be one of our guiding pillars. It should be a reminder for the ways in which God has blessed us. Additionally, it should open us up to the reciprocity that our Indigenous kin naturally know — that gratitude is about give and take, offering and receiving.
In an effort to more fully integrate gratitude into our lives, my wife and I started a tradition years ago. Every night as we lie in bed and wait for sleep to come, we share what we’re thankful for that day. We take turns listing people, experiences, mundane moments — anything that comes to mind. No matter how hard the day’s been, even if it was full of bad events, we don’t settle down for sleep until we’ve each named a few things. Over the course of a few years, we’ve learned there’s always something to be thankful for.
That small nightly ritual has made me more observant of the world around us. It’s easier to notice the beauty of creation. It’s also easier to see the suffering of my neighbor and to see if there’s a way I can offer a hand. Perhaps when we intentionally look for gratitude, we allow ourselves to be transformed into people for whom others might give thanks.
As we move into a season that’s overly-commercialized and demands that we spend every dollar we have, I want to encourage you to stay rooted in gratitude. Allow it to keep you connected to the rhythm of life around you. Let it open your eyes to the small things that are no less wondrous due to their size: the changing leaves, the birds singing their morning songs, the stars that twinkle in the cold winter sky.
Allow gratitude to become a spiritual practice that allows you to stay connected to the world God made. Maybe you’ll be able to see yourself as an important piece of this larger web of life, the web that connects us all.
The Rev. Kali Cawthon-Freels is a pastoral resident at Williamsburg Baptist Church.
https://www.pilotonline.com/2025/11/30/faith-values-the-power-of-gratitude/