(I was off celebrating a day of gratitude out of town, and this didn’t get published on Thanksgiving.  However, I think these thoughts about gratitude and Thanksgiving every day.  Many blessings to you all as we move into this season of light and love and gratitude for each other!)

In the United States, we celebrate Thanksgiving, a day of feasting and hopefully a day of warmth and intimacy with our dearest family, friends and neighbors.  Sometimes people joke about Thanksgiving being a time of gathering with dysfunctional family members.  However, it can be a time of true intimacy and meaning if you make it so.

Part of gratitude comes first from within us and how we perceive our world.  Energy begets energy, kindness begets kindness, love begets love.  How we deal with the polarizing forces of love and hate, kindness and cruelty, gratitude and thanklessness and indifference, is up to us.

Gratitude comes out in the actions we model ourselves for our children.  This Thanksgiving holiday, bring along a sweet story basket and offer to  tell all of the children a wonderful story with puppets and props.  Take a walk with the children, help them play, help them make Thanksgiving crafts, and enjoy the smallest members of the family.  The more we give to the children and to others, the more we receive ourselves.  Use your most pleasant words and  warmest feelings and pass this time together in a beautiful way.

In this time of thanksgiving, both as an official holiday and a state of the heart, I wanted to extend my gratitude to all of you.  This blog has been up and running for five years now, still rather young, but happily still around to talk about peaceful parenting from a developmental perspective.  I thank all of you from the bottom of my heart.

Blessings and love,

Carrie