Thanksgiving – Emptying The Backpack

Nov 17, 2025

Thanksgiving is next week.

Not this week.

Thanksgiving is next week. Not this week. Nevertheless, at least a handful of folks will show up at Aunt Frankie’s door, cranberry jello mold and Mrs.Schubert’s rolls in hand this Thursday, convinced that holiday we set aside for football and eating is indeed upon us.

I believe we can blame the whole “4th Thursday” rule. That formula for football and the fixins’ was reportedly set by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in order that retailers could establish a set shopping schedule.

Good for them. For us, it may be too complicated. It reminds me of that strange game we played on our knuckles that was supposed to help us remember which months have 30 days, not 31. Even if we take the time to look at a calendar and count, well, it’s math. In our heads.

Find a calendar (hint – might be a handy one on your phone). Find the 1st Thursday of November 2025, which is the 6th, then count…so 13th, 20th, oops, yeah, Thanksgiving is the 28th. Not this week.

Given half a chance, some of us still standing on the stoop might try to convince Aunt Frankie. She has, by this time, rummaged around and found an actual paper calendar to prove to us how wrong we are.

Maybe we would cajole her while the jello mold wiggled in our hands. “How do you feel about two celebrations? I mean, here we are on the stoop, maybe a fresh pie in hand. You know those pumpkin pies don’t keep well.”

Sadly, we’re probably not the only idiots who didn’t show up for work…on the wrong holiday.

Getting the day right for Thanksgiving is not as easy as if the date were set, like how Christmas is December 25. Nevertheless, having a set day doesn’t guarantee a stressless holiday either. Just ask any pastor or priest.

When I served a church, I was swept up into a fierce debate more than once because, that year, Christmas fell on a Sunday. Gasp!

“You’re not planning on having Church on Christmas, are you Pastor?”

“You’re not planning on having Church on Christmas, are you Pastor?”

“Well, it is a Sunday. And we would be celebrating Christ’s birth in worship. Wouldn’t that be great?”

“We can celebrate the baby Jesus the week before” was the retort.

“Let me get this straight. You want to celebrate the baby Jesus, the birth of Jesus, a week early so it won’t interfere with Christmas?”

“Precisely. All the grandchildren will be waking up at our house and running downstairs to open presents on Christmas morning!”

“How about you come after opening the presents?”

“I’ll be cooking the Christmas meal.”

“But it’s Sunday.”

“Right. It’s Sunday AND Christmas. You cannot expect us to come to church on Christmas.”

The logic still escapes me.

I personally have been needing to remind myself for two weeks now to hold off on the turkey because I keep wanting to make crescent rolls a week early. Actually, the whole confusing holiday discussion started in my home this year at the beginning of November when I explained to my husband that, while we often remember veterans on the Sunday before the actual day, Veterans Day is always on 11/11. November 11. Always. Actually at 11 a.m. on 11/11. This discussion quickly devolved, though, into the confusing world of holiday “days versus dates, fixed days versus floating dates.”

Fixed date holidays occur on the same calendar date every year regardless of the day of the week: New Year’s is always January 1 and Independence Day is always July 4. We generally don’t mess with those.

“Labor Day is always a Monday but it’s the first Monday, just like Halloween is the last Friday in October,” my husband offered.

Actually, the holiday of Halloween is always October 31st, but that’s really confusing because sometimes the day is celebrated earlier to allow kids to “trick or treat” when it isn’t a school night. That can be especially confusing, though and I suspect we’re not the only family who has had people show up on a random day in the week of Halloween annoyed when we didn’t have candy to offer them.

“One way we can mark Thanksgiving might be to remember it comes the day before Black Friday,” my husband suggested, “except now Black Friday sales start before Halloween, so there’s that.”

As if the whole fourth Thursday thing isn’t complicated enough, our son is playing fast and loose with the need for a set calendar date for his wedding anniversary (2nd one coming up soon). Our daughter-in-law points out it is November 17, but our son suggests it’s easier for him to remember to celebrate on the Friday before Thanksgiving, since that was when they got married. Granted that’d be easier in some respects since this year the anniversary is on a Monday, but, in the future, that’s gonna make things even more complicated because they’ll be figuring out the 4th Thursday then back tracking 6 days! And if he gets Thanksgiving wrong….

Maybe we just all need Alexa to tell us-like those white boards do in eldercare facilities. We used one during COVID when we did not leave home or see another soul for days. We wrote on it every evening before we went to sleep and kept it posted on the refrigerator. We relied on that white board all those mornings when the calendar and days seemed to just float all around us without any tether. Our trusty, dusty white board told us the day of the week, the date and month and any upcoming holidays. Sometimes we even reminded ourselves the forecast was for rain or that supper would be chicken. The calendar and especially the upcoming holiday reminders mattered during COVID because it kept us oriented, kept us from flying off into holiday madness or forgetting an important birthday.

We just finished the daylight savings debates, so, maybe we need the date versus day of the week/month debate for holidays. I could make that argument for pastors and priests, for sure. Those among us who don’t attend church and even a few churchgoers have no idea how complicated it is for pastors to plan some of the holidays. Take Easter, for example. Pastors and priests must first find Easter on the calendar which means finding the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. From there they count back the six weeks prior to mark Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday. And yes, these occur on a Wednesday and a Thursday. People really do ask. Fewer still seem to realize that there is counting involved before you can start lighting Advent candles on Sundays in Advent.

Perhaps we just need to copy Advent calendars and eat a piece of chocolate each day to lead us up to any given holiday. Or see if Alexa has a countdown to holidays application?

Better yet, maybe we need to go back to the Town Crier who would walk through the streets of European villages, ringing a bell and shouting, “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” That’s French for “Hear ye, Hear ye, Hear ye!” People in the community would recognize that the bell ringing and the crying of those words would warn us that the crier brought us big news. Or perhaps told us of an impending holiday.

I’m certain a town crier ringing a bell, waking us in the early hours to warn us that “Today is NOT Thanksgiving!” might have saved a few of us some time, money and embarrassment.

Rethinking Black Friday (the day after) Thanksgiving and Gratitude

Like most of you, over here we have much to be thankful for, even if we don’t have everything we want. Included on our list are good health in spite of old age, plenty to pay the bills (and then some in spite of inflation) and a gaggle of children and grandchildren who work hard and strive to love one another.

This year, perched at the top of my own gratitude list, though, has to be the image of our seven-year-old granddaughter, who has struggled mightily all of her life with Cystic Fibrosis and who endures daily treatments and meds and shots and the periodic hospitalization. This Thanksgiving, this child was walking around a potluck supper gathering with a spiral notebook and a pen. She was asking everyone who would speak to her (and she is pretty hard to miss with curly red hair) what they were thankful for and then writing that down in her notebook. My heart is certainly full.

In the circle that is our family, I am thankful our grandchildren are being taught already about gratitude. In a larger context, I feel especially hopeful that our nation has set aside one day a year to teach the art of giving thanks. While we love to indulge in our turkey and stuffing and jello salads and football on the fourth Thursday of November, we do also have to admit this is pretty much our ONLY national day of remembering that we are thankful.

Certainly, not everyone insists everyone at the table say somehing they are thankful for before the gravy is passed, but a lot more of us do that on Thanksgiving than on any other day in this country, so, there’s that. Moment of gratitude for our moments of gratitude. You know it carries over. While we were thankful for one another ON that Thursday, on the next day, the Friday, BLACK FRIDAY, we are grateful that we shared our gratitude, that we said it out loud. That’s not all, though While on Thanksgiving we talk about being thankful, our gratitude on the day after Thanksgiving is different.

…our gratitude on the day after Thanksgiving is different.

Sure, we might be thankful that we didn’t have to wait an extra three or four hours for the meal because the yams wouldn’t bake or the rolls wouldn’t rise or the last visitor was late. Or, maybe we are thankful the custard pie “stood up” or that our teenaged grandchild still hugs us or that a chair or two that had been empty too long was filled again for, oh, so many reasons. On Black Friday, we often find that our gratitude has evolved and perhaps even grown significantly. I, for one, have found that I now need to include Black Friday itself on my gratitude list and not because I could, if I wanted, go indulge my shopping habit.

In the past, though, I would say I loathed Black Friday. IMHO, Black Friday was as annoying as Christmas songs being played before Halloween is over, setting up your Christmas tree before Thanksgiving or, yes, the overuse of acronyms. (See above.)

Now I have to admit that Black Friday is the unsung hero of the weekend and perhaps is to be credited with keeping Thanksgiving on the calendar.

Think about it. Thanksgiving on its own struggles to stand out among the fall holidays. Really, other than the nearly extinct cornucopia, there is little to distinguish the holiday. As one comedian put it, there is only one Thanksgiving character and we hunt him down, kill him and eat him. There are no costumes really except those Pilgrims and only one or two songs we sing at school assemblies or maybe in church. A media search for images brings up mostly pumpkins and leaves and maybe a Pilgrims coloring page.

Really, other than the nearly extinct cornucopia, there is little to distinguish the holiday.

I would posit that Thanksgiving itself needs to be grateful for Black Friday. What a boost to Thanksgiving that so many workers get Friday off, for example. Think about it: the whole shopping craze means employers would be hard pressed to take Friday back and make folks work because of the economic bump from Black Friday sales. Without Black Friday, Thanksgiving might fade quickly, becoming that holiday with the funny hats and too much food we used to celebrate. And then where would our national thankfulness be?

Black Friday is the unsung hero really of the weekend, right?

So, this is a bit of Black Friday gratitude (maybe Gratitude with capital “G?”) Thank you, Black Friday, for protecting and preserving the one day a year we all at least think about why we are grateful. I will no longer begrudge you the shopping and endless ads and mayhem and Jingle Bells onslaught. I will no long even complain about the early decorating or the Christmas items that appear on the shelves before Halloween.

We Need You, Black Friday.

Hang in there. Without you, Black Friday, we might just go straight from Halloween to Christmas after all. Without you, I might never have realized how much hope some folks need and derive from all that early decorating, shopping and singing. Most of all, if we did not still have a designated day of gratitude, I would not have this memory to treasure of a seven-year-old, who in spite of the fact tht she was counting down the days until her next dreaded blood draw, was asking total strangers to share their gratitude with her. So, thanks to all that helps us keep this day of Gratitude around, especially Black Friday. I am shopping already for a cornucopia for next year just to do my bit to help keep Thanksgiving (and its protector, Black Friday) around.

Was your gratitude list different after Thanksgiving this year? Leave a reply and share your gratitude today, too.

Tag: Thanksgiving

Wait! Which day is Thanksgiving?

Rethinking Black Friday (the day after) Thanksgiving and Gratitude

We Need You, Black Friday.

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