Finneran: The Best Holiday

Friday, November 29, 2019

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Tom Finneran

Thanksgiving.

It’s the very best of our holidays.

Thanksgiving invites calm and thoughtful gratitude into our busy and complicated lives. And, although gratitude is often missing from our daily thoughts, we have much for which to be grateful.

Start with life itself, so often taken for granted. Consider the excitement of a young couple expecting their first child. They are nervous and frightened but also thrilled beyond words at the miracle of a baby growing in the womb. This is a new life, brought forth with great hope.

Or, consider the other end of the spectrum, when life ebbs away. Families gather as hope diminishes, praying for one more sunrise, one more sunset, one more walk along the beach. In each instance—birth and death-- there is gratitude for life itself.

The pause of Thanksgiving is important. It is not a spontaneous party. It involves planning. It involves preparation. It involves travel, often distant. In these United States, the holiday dominates the thinking and activities of a few hundred million people for four or five straight days. It is during that pause from everyday activities that gratitude surges forth.

We are, or should be, grateful for the blessings of health. Ask the sick or crippled person what is second in daily importance, only taking a back seat to life itself? The instant reply is good health. Better yet, ask the fabulously wealthy person suffering the ordeals of failing health the same question. Anyone with wisdom would quickly choose the blessings of health over the glitz of wealth.

Our freedoms warrant gratitude as well. Freedom of worship, freedom of speech, and the right to choose our public leaders are of inestimable value. Do you doubt? Look at Hong Kong, simply yearning to breathe, free of state-sponsored thuggery.

This special American holiday recognizes the joys of abundance as well. We celebrate food. We celebrate drink. We celebrate comfort and shelter and opportunity. America has never been perfect, but it has always striven to be good. And to be an American in the twenty-first century is to have won life’s lottery. Even the poorest Americans generally live longer lives of better health, better food, better nutrition, better shelter, and greater convenience than the princes of old Europe.

It’s not that our other holidays lack charm or significance. The Martin Luther King holiday celebrates our nation’s first principle, that all people are created equal. That principle never disappears or fades from our discourse, unlike the missing-in-action nature of gratitude. Christmas and Easter are Christian holidays and, by definition, are not universally embraced. Sadly, each of those “seasons” now tend to get buried in commercialism. Memorial Day is a solemn recognition of the sacrifice of others. This day too, like the King holiday, bears daily recognition and respect.

July 4th is a flat-out coast to coast birthday celebration. Happy Birthday to us. Labor Day celebrates the many contributions of workers to our nation’s well being and abundance. And Veterans’ Day, as with Memorial Day, carries forth the tribute of the nation to those who served, and fought, and died.

It’s an interesting array of those matters we hold most dear. This season, this Thanksgiving weekend, may we give thanks for our many blessings.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.