on giving thanks

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the States.

I haven’t formally celebrated Thanksgiving Day for the past 10 years or so. It’s not a holiday in Britain.

Side note: Why have the British adopted Black Friday, which celebrates the worse in consumerism and not Thanksgiving? You would have thought that spending time with family and giving thanks for the good things in your life would have taken precedence over standing in long lines to be the first in the door to run around a shop like a lunatic to buy some piece of junk you probably don’t need just because it’s on sale!

Go figure, as they say!

As an adult, Thanksgiving used to be my favorite holiday. The family used to travel from all over the country to gather at my grandma’s house in New Jersey for Thanksgiving. She would put on a feast fit for kings.

When we first moved to England back in 2000, we came over with a bunch of other American families, and as a group of expats, we would gather together to celebrate the tradition of Thanksgiving. But once the project we came over for was finished, all the families, except for mine, moved back to the States. Because my wife is British, we stayed.

And over the years, we just stopped formally celebrating Thanksgiving Day.

Of course, giving thanks in the form of gratitude should be something that everyone practices regularly. There are numerous advantages to practicing gratitude on a regular basis. Here are a few that I think are important.

5 Reasons to be thankful

1 Gratitude improves your mental health by helping you manage emotions more effectively and avoiding negative thinking patterns like rumination or blame-placing guilt cycles that lead to depression symptoms like hopelessness and despair (not fun!).

2. Gratitude helps you appreciate what you have. Instead of complaining about what you don’t have, or obsessing over what you do have, practicing gratitude will help you see all the good things in life that are already there for you.

3. Gratitude can change your life. When we focus on being grateful for everything in our lives, we start to see our lives differently and become more aware of how lucky we are to have what we do have! This changes everything: your relationship with yourself and others, your moods and your energy levels.

4. Gratitude helps build self-confidence. When we practice gratitude regularly, it helps us realize how amazing we are as human beings—how powerful we are as creators of our own happiness! The more confident you are in yourself, the more confident you will be in your ability to attract all of the good things you want into your life.

And lastly:

5. Gratitude makes you more optimistic about the future. Practicing gratitude helps build resilience because when things go wrong—and they will at some point in your life—you won’t be as likely to fall apart if you know that everything has worked out well in the past and will continue working out well in the future because of all the good things that came before it!

If you’ve made it this far, here’s a big THANK YOU from me. I appreciate you giving up some of your valuable time to read my words. It means a lot to me.