Thanksgiving has been around since the 1500s,
1533 to be specific.
Late 1600s turnt into a holiday.
The act of giving thanks,
Prayer for expressing gratitude
And celebration of goodness.
Furnish up your dining room table with 2 through 12 chairs
With your valuable table cloth on it.
On top, your most expensive, gold plated or silverware.
Antique crystal cups with the chandelier lights hanging from the ceiling.
Surrounded by kin you see once a year for the occasion.
Every single person brings a dish, for the nourishment.
Prepare it good, make it look pretty.
Turkey in the middle, next to the ham.
Mashed potatoes and gravy, macaroni and cheese, cranberry sauce and yams,
Bread rolls, greens, green beans and potato salad,
Cornbread and deviled eggs.
Each family is different and varies.
This is a brief menu of my Thanksgiving history.
Water, juice, soda, wine and hard liquor.
Every type of dessert available —
Mine and mommas icebox lemon pie.
Mingle, laugh, talk and greet family, loved ones, good friends and family associates.
Then, at the right moment, everything gets serious.
Like beating a spoon or a fork on a glass to get everyone’s attention;
Everyone hold hands and bow their heads.
One by one, everybody say what they’re thankful for,
Now that’s expressing gratitude,
Now that’s celebration of goodness,
Now that’s giving thanks.
In my family,
Now that’s what we call Thanksgiving.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Here are our ground rules:
- You must credit Prison Journalism Project. In the byline, we prefer “[Author Name], Prison Journalism Project.” At the top of the text of your story, please include a line that says: “This story was originally published by Prison Journalism Project” and include a link to the article.
- No republishing of photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No editing the content, including the headline, except to reflect changes in time, location and editorial style. For example, changing, “today” to “last week,” or San Quentin to San Quentin, California. You can also make minor revisions for style or headline size, and you can trim stories for space. You must also retain all original hyperlinks, including links to the Prison Journalism Project newsletters.
- No translation of our stories into another language without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No selling ads against our stories, but you can publish it on a page with ads that you’ve already sold.
- No reselling or syndicating our stories, including on platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. You also can’t republish our work automatically or all at once. Please select them individually.
- No scraping our website or using our stories to populate websites designed to improve search rankings or gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
- Any site our stories appear on must have a prominent and effective way to contact you.
- If we send you a request to remove our story, you must do so immediately.
- If you share republished stories on social media, please tag Prison Journalism Project. We have official accounts on Twitter (@prisonjourn), Facebook (@prisonjournalism), Instagram (@prisonjournalism) and Linked In.
- Let us know when you share the story. Send us a note, so we can keep track.
Thanksgiving Gratitude
