Hannukkah Thankfulness

also known as the Festival of Lights and Feast of Dedication. In a strange way, it makes sense that these celebrations are woven together this year, Hanukkah and Thanksgiving.

It is so dark already at 4:30 and people in our neighborhood have been putting up their Christmas lights as if Thanksgiving is only a doorway through which we must enter to go to the land of Christmas.  This year in spite of our consumer driven orgy of freakish spending I will savor this one holiday that is marked by the humility of gratefulness.  I will pause at this door before I skip to the festival of lights, we will have a feast of dedication. Another year, we have been blessed beyond measure with health and jobs, a warm house and more than enough of everything.

We all really need to pause at this door of thankfulness, if just for a day before we get caught in the whirlpool of Christmas. Maybe if we pause in humility we will be graced with contentment and there is nothing like the true Spirit of Christmas that doesn't look like a HUGE dose of contentment birthed by the doorway of Thanksgiving, a feast of dedication.