Amid feasts and family gatherings. Americans across the . world pause today to give thanks for life’s goodness that embodies . many. many blessings. Thanksgiving, one of America’s favorite holidays, had its origin in the cradle years of civilization in this country, as we know it today. In those first years, the Pilgrims especially expressed thanks for survival, for a harvest that provided the necessities of life. and for the freedom they found in the New World despite hardships endured to achieve it. Through the years, the meaning of Thanksgiving expanded – and so did the blessings as America became a land of abundance, a citadel of freedom, and land of peace and opportunity. In this year of 1976, there are problems to be reckoned with. A sudden return to life of the inflation we thought was pretty much licked; persistently high unemployment (although maybe not so bad considering the expanding number of people in the labor force); other uncertain economic news; and warring and strife in some areas oi the world. These cast shadows over the holiday in 1976 – shadows that may stretch into succeeding years but hopefully will emerge into better days and situations. Looking at the bright side, there certainly have been far, far worse years in which to celebrate Thanksgiving. Consider 1621, which tradition remembers as the year of the first Thanksgiving in America. The Pilgrims had lost half their tiny band of 100 souls to disease during the terrible winter before. Although the survivors had Eine on to reap a good harvest, eir colony on a raw and inhospitable continent was by no means established or secure. Yet those who remained gave thanks – not merely for their survival but for the opportunity still offered to them for building a new life in a new land for themselves and their posterity. Or consider 1863, the year of Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, from which we date our modern observance. The nation was in the midst of the terrible Civil War. Although there had been a great victory for the Union at Gettysburg in July, no one could foresee how many more months of bloodletting, of brother fighting brother, were still to be endured. Yet the people have thanks not for mere survival but for the promise of peace and the opportunity, as Lincoln was later to phrase it, “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and to join North and South, to fashion an even stronger and more perfect Union. Realistically, there have been few times in history when there have been no crises on the horizon. Indded, with all our problems of today, there probably have been few times when life was better for the greater number than it is today; when the future was less forbidding and more promising than it is today when, in short, Americans had more reason to be thankful than they have today. Our freedoms, though some may be diminished to some degree, stand reasonably secure and our American soliders are not engaged in warfare any place in the world. Thus, on this holiday of gratitude, we truly can give thanks for our own and our country’s blessings as Americans always have done and always will.