What Thanks Give

Face to Face

What Thanks Gives

I have lived through 90 Thanksgivings, and I remember all but the first several. Those of childhood and youth rather blend together, because they were reliably the same. Rather than a boring sameness, this was an exciting promise of yet another wonderful family time.

Each Thanksgiving began with a mid-morning service at our Milwaukee church. Our dinner was in the evening at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Uncles and aunts were there—and cousins. The younger ones were relegated to card tables at a convenient distance from the adults. We were naïve about the purpose in this arrangement and imagined it a special privilege for children on a special day. Cousin Robert would take us into a dark closet and tell ghost stories.

Then Robert went off to sea in the Navy and older cousin Paul went to the Army air corps as a fighter pilot in Italy. We were proud of the two silver stars on the service flag in Grandma’s window. Our older cousins began bringing their new soldier husbands. The menu became modified to reflect the WWII restrictions of food rationing, but aunts combined ration stamps to make it adequate. The spirit of the day did the rest.

One of the most exciting Thanksgivings was the year the older boys at church invited me to join them in the traditional touch football game following the service, at the same playground every year. I felt accepted and grown up.

Thanksgiving wasn’t then compromised by Black Friday.

While at Wheaton College, I either went to a classmate’s home for Thanksgiving or brought one or two home with me. These were usually foreign students or MKs.

Thanksgiving during Army basic training was lonely. I sat on my bunk mentally rehearsing all the Thanksgivings at home. The cooks outdid themselves on this non-training day. I witnessed another fine Army tradition when the company officers came with their families to eat with the troops. We had a family Thanksgiving after all.

In my first seminary year, a married student invited me to have dinner with his family. This was an auspicious occasion because it was his wife’s first Thanksgiving as an American citizen. She was native Japanese and had married my classmate when he was stationed there in the US Air Force. The newspaper presumptuously reported her as serving us Japanese food although her menu was as American as anyone could make it. “I American now!” Sheepishly, they confessed their intention also to invite a single nursing instructor by the name of Ann to set us up. It took some restraint for me not to confess that at the Thanksgiving Eve service I had made my first move to recover what I had messed up on at Wheaton College. They thought she would make a good wife for me, and she has been for over 62 years.

In my second seminary year, I took my bride home to join the rest of my family. The rest of hers were in Ghana and Mali, and I was yet to spend a Thanksgiving with them to complete our family.

In the first year of our first pastorate near Detroit, a large family absorbed us into themselves, and we were immediately at home. It was our kind of family and our kind of Thanksgiving.

The first year in our New Jersey pastorate we were left thousands of miles distant from our families. It took a while for those Easterners to understand Midwesterners, and we them. But a Wheaton classmate in Grand Rapids alerted her family in distant Newark who invited us up from the shore. Their thoughtful kindness became the final definition of Thanksgiving. Ever since, we have looked around for those who would otherwise be as we might have been.

No one should be alone on Thanksgiving, and the joy we learned from the thoughtfulness of others brings at least as much joy to us as to our guests. It has become a time of thankful giving.

I learned Thanksgiving is a time not so much to preach but to listen to the pews. A mentally disturbed woman testified to the peace she has experienced through faith in God. An old man reared in a drafty farmhouse: “I thank God for a warm house.” A man who had recently lost speech from a stroke labored: “Thank-you-for-pray-ing-for-me.” Macho men for the only time in public: “I am thankful for my wife and my children.” “I thank God Sam is having his first Thanksgiving dinner with Jesus.”

The thanks I give this Thanksgiving is for Thanksgiving itself and for what all these Thanksgivings have given to me. It is not just the giving of thanks but what thanks gives.

Connections gives thanks for Wallace Alcorn

Pastor, teacher, writer, army chaplain and friend.