Thanksgiving a Time to be Thankful

I can't believe its Thanksgiving again, every year is beginning to blur into the next. I am looking forward to today though, it going to be nice just a few family members at the family home. Usually its a whole slew of 2nd and 3rd cousins out at the cabin, which is nice too, but considering the way life has been going lately less is more. Its just nice to get away from the unpacking and disarray of our lives right now into the safety of home.

I am lucky I have a mother who loves to cook and she enjoys taking care of her family. For all the difficulties we seem to have as mother and daughter, I know that she is always there.

My children are my biggest blessing and I am so fortunate that they love each other so openly and unconditionally. My mother-in-law thinks they are too close but I think that's a good thing. They need to know that the other one will be there for them no matter what. How many siblings can say that they can count on each other?

Everyone has been blessed by God, however we spend so much time focusing on what we don't have, what others do have, and how misfortune has darkened our doorways that we can't see what is right in front of us. Our family learned the lesson of appreciation lately and how relative it is.

We sold our beautiful home to move 12 hours away to a much more expensive market. Everything we looked at, everything we put an offer on, was less than what we had and cost $ 150 000 more. We rented an old crappy duplex for the summer because it was in the same neighbourhood as the home we had an accepted offer on. When the offer fell through and we had to spend September in the old place too our family was stressed and unhappy. We tried to purchase another home in the area but with the market boiling over, every offer we submitted was rejected in favor of a competing bid. We finally found a rental that cost more but would provide us with a more perminate home until we found a house to purchase.

Everyone in the family was so thrilled to find this place, move in, and were so greatful to have found something that met our needs. Overnight the mood in our home went from depression to elation and our son finally was happy to be at the coast. Thing is, if we had moved from our house in Calgary to this home we would have been frustrated with it. We wouldn't have been grateful to be paying more to live there, we needed the experience in the dump to transition us to less for more. For that we can be grateful for the extra month there.

In Canada and the US no matter what we are going through, where we are living, or what we have we can be grateful. We live here and not in a third world country struggling to find a crumb, a morsel, a handout to survive. We have so much and yet we all feel we do not have enough. Compared to 90% of the world, we all have everything and for that we should be thankful.