It was the best Thanksgiving weekend! Really. We ate the same foods at the same places with the same people and the same traditions, but something about it was just extra good. Mississippi State beating Ole Miss certainly didn’t hurt, but that wasn’t it. It was just sweet. There was one new thing. In my 54 years, this was the first year that food assignments were given out for Thanksgiving. I’m not talking about ice and cups and rolls. I’m talking real assignments. Not that we, the “next generation,” haven’t ever offered, but we’ve never been taken up on it. We can only speculate on the reason. Well, this was our year. After 54 years of coming in with nothing but our purses, we were called up for service. It was like the draft and we reported for duty. 

I was to bring sweet potato casserole and butter beans. For 43 people. Nothing like throwing us in the deep end to see what would happen. I’m use to cooking for four people and, most recently, two. How does one estimate how many sweet potatoes to peel for 43? What is the equation for figuring out how many butter beans 43 people can eat? I just don’t deal in such large increments in the kitchen. But, sticking with my belief that I’d rather have too much than not enough, I got pretty close on the sweet potatoes, but I overshot the butter beans by about 39 servings.

I do think the “next generation” nailed our first attempt at Thanksgiving assistance. No hospitalizations for food-borne illness were reported so yay for us. I’m pretty confident in my basic, weekday culinary skills, but something about cooking for Thanksgiving had me guessing, second-guessing, calling Mama, looking on Pinterest, and googling. I mean, nobody wants to be the generation that drops the Thanksgiving baton. If my grandmother, mother, and aunt hadn’t set and maintained the bar at such mouth-watering heights, it wouldn’t be so unnerving. The real test comes when we inherit the making of the dressing and the caramel cake, but I can’t even think about that yet. 

Well, my favorite time of year is passing like a speeding train, while summer sputtered and crept through here like it was running out of gas, burning oil, and riding on its rims. Halloween has already come and gone and we’re well into November now with Thanksgiving only a couple of weeks away. Please. I want to slow down this ride that I’ve been waiting in line for since May! 

Last week, we watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown with our Halloween dinner guests. It’s a nostalgic must. A night of kids in costumes, doorbells, Sugar Babies, and Linus all reminded me of some old times. When my brothers and I would get home from trick or treating, we’d pour the contents of our plastic pumpkins out on the floor. We’d inventory it and organize it all into piles of likes and dislikes and then start our trades. Those peanut butter things, wrapped in orange and black, tasted like mud, but my brother liked them so I’d trade them for something fruity out of his stash. Bit-O-Honey, Three Musketeers, Milky Way, Red Hots, cinnamon discs- those were other confections you’d find in my cull pile. I was always ready for negotiations as far as those were concerned. 

After we’d do our bargaining and eat some of the loot, we’d put everything else back into our buckets to be enjoyed over the next week or so. At risk of sounding like I’m 87, we didn’t get candy all the time like kids do now. There wasn’t a treasure chest at school for rewarding good work or a candy jar at home for accomplishments like potty victories. No, your prize at school was maybe a gold foil star licked by your teacher- you didn’t even get to enjoy the minty adhesive. And, well, parents thought achievement in the bathroom at home was its own reward as you got to walk around with dry pants and a little self-dignity. That was your prize. It was a harsher world then, kids. Well, I didn’t mean to chase that rabbit so far, but the point was that candy wasn’t an everyday thing- it was a treat. 

So, the days after Halloween, we’d get home from school and head straight for our candy. Each afternoon, we’d dig around and find the best options available to us in our plastic pumpkins and enjoy and savor a few pieces. On those first few days, it was an embarrassment of riches with just too many good choices. As the week went on, there were more and more wrappers and less and less candy. Each day, we’d go and look for the very best that was available to us that day. As time went on, the best available got further and further from our top choices, but we were still happy to have it. About a week past Halloween, like we are now, we’d get home from school and run our hands around the inside of our buckets. We’d feel a bunch of balled-up foil wrappers and wax papers and empty cellophane sleeves- all holding only the smell and memory of all the wonderful things we’d enjoyed- until finally, we’d find it! That last piece of candy that hadn’t been chosen until then. Sure, whatever was left in there wasn’t our first choice or even our 20th  choice, for that matter, but we were so glad to have found it among the growing pile of disappointment. 

I thought how that memory is a good metaphor for life. Some days, we feel like queens with our buckets full of so many good things, good events, good blessings, good relationships, good news. We’re talking Milk Duds, Now and Laters, Fun Dip, Sugar Daddy, Whatchamacallit bar. We don’t know where to start with our thankfulness, our excitement, our enjoyment. We all have times like that when we feel overcome with gratitude and so undeserving of the graciousness of God. And then, there are a lot of days when we may realize we have a lot, but it feels like routine or average goodness to our human-natured minds. You know- the Smarties, Dubble Bubble, Pixie Stix, wax bottles. Nothing too exciting but certainly nothing terrible either. Maybe we live most of our days here. We’re definitely not complaining, but we’re more likely to take the generosity of God for granted there in the middle of the road. And, from time to time, we all find ourselves rifling around the bottom, desperate to find just one piece of goodness in the empty wrappings of what once was. In the heap, there sits a peppermint ball or a green sucker like they hand out at the bank. On a normal day, we might not even recognize it as a gift but, against a dark backdrop, it’s easy to see it as the glimmer of God’s goodness. Maybe it’s here we’re most aware of His provision. 

It’s Thanksgiving month. We like to think we’re always grateful for what we have, but something about the holiday season makes us even more sensitive to the presence of goodness in our lives. I have times when I feel like my pumpkin is full and I’m overwhelmed with gratefulness. But, I also know the feeling of having my gratitude and wonder wane during long stretches of average and ordinary days. Times when I know for certain that I’m blessed, but my thankfulness gets swallowed up by the routine familiarity of it all. And I know there a lot of people who are struggling to find any good in their situations right now. We’ve all found ourselves there in desperate times and on our worst days when we’re tempted to wonder if God has anything good left for us. No matter where we are, I hope we can wake up each day and look to find the best that God has given us for that day. And celebrate that. Enjoy that. Thank Him for that. No matter how extravagant or how small- no matter how obvious or how much we have to sift through just to find it, it’s in there. God’s goodness is always in there somewhere. 

Keep our eyes open to Your goodness, God.