JOY ALONG THE WAY: THANKSGIVING PRAYERS

The holiday of Thanksgiving, so they say, depends upon the President's proclamation for the day to be set aside. What if he didn't do it? Forgot it? You think we wouldn't celebrate? Silly thought. A special day for Thanksgiving is so ingrained in our nation's history that few people know that the day has to be officially proclaimed.

Under-shadowed by All Saints Day, over-shadowed by Christmas, Thanksgiving remains securely situated between the two and has its own inimitable aura. There are no ghosts or jack-o-lanterns, no baubles, tinsel or poinsettias. Thanksgiving is good, earthy stuff; friendship hanks of corn at the door, pumpkin, gourd, and pots of mums on the steps.

I have what one might call a Thanksgiving shelf in the kitchen. Maybe certain spices and canned foods just gravitate to it during the year. There's a lot of gravitation going on in my cabinets which leads to perplexing questions: Where's the cornstarch? Where's the toothpicks, the cumin, the cassia oil?

I made an inventory of this shelf a few days ago: two big cans of pumpkin, a jar of mincemeat, two small cans of condensed milk, package of pecans, all the good old spices, and the turkey tureen. Still, I had a little vacant place left on this shelf. "A place for Thanksgiving memories," I whispered to myself.

Most of my memories of old Thanksgivings do not center around a big roasted turkey and crinkled crusted pumpkin pie. Not even lots of kinfolk around the table.

Those around the table were just the ones who lived there all the time--Grandpa, Grandma, Daddy, Mama, Lillian, Lou and me. And it was the Thanksgiving prayers we said that live on in the recesses of my mind. Not literally or verbatim do they linger, except a few, just the general gist of them.

Everyone around the table had to offer a prayer, out loud. These prayers always started with Grandpa and went around the table to me, the last one, whose feet didn't yet touch the floor from the branch where Lou and I sat.

Being farmers, living off the land, most of the prayers centered around thanks for the good earth. No, it was always the good, rich earth. Thanks were earthy and specific, not lofty, platitudinous, memorized or vague echoes of what some minister had offered. Grandpa may have said, "And thank you, God, for the good crop of turnips we reaped from the Little Island." (The Little Island being a rich spot of land the river cut off from a portion of the meadow).

Mama might have let a little bit of literature creep into her prayers such as, "It is good, Lord, to take the meadow sweet with hay and listen to the murmuring pines . . ." She stopped short of hemlocks, knowing none of us had ever seen a hemlock.

I paused a little while in my rearrangement of the cinnamon and nutmeg to remember one special Thanksgiving. After giving heartfelt thanks for all the good things that had come our way in the past year, it was Lou's time. So many things had already been covered by the time it got around to Lou and me it was hard not to be repetitious. But the special remembrance was of the year when Lou, after hearing all the thanks for our bountiful blessings, said, "And I thank you, Lord, for all the hard, bad things that have happened to us because they make us stronger and give us know-how to deal with them should they come again."

There was a long silence while Lou's prayer was being analyzed and digested. A log in the fireplace broke in two and sent up a flurry of sparks.

So now it was my time. What more could I say? Finally I mumbled, "And I thank you for all the in-between things, Lord. There are a lot of them."

Then, in unison, as we had been taught, we all repeated, "Most of all, God, we thank you for sending your Son to rub out our sins and give us a clean, new, fresh start.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southerast Missourian.