By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – This Thanksgiving will be a strange one.

Most Thanksgivings, my wife, my children and I host family and friends at our home. When we don’t do that, we travel to celebrate the holiday with siblings and cousins.

Wherever we are, the ritual is pretty much the same. We eat too much. We catch up. We tell stories. Some of us watch football on television. If it’s cold outside, others sit by the fire.

Generally, at some point, I fall into a food coma and find a quiet place to take a snooze.

Simple pleasures.

Easy to take for granted.

But that’s sort of the point of Thanksgiving.

At its heart, this holiday is supposed to serve as a reminder that we should be aware of the blessings that surround us, however commonplace those blessings may be. This day is meant to serve as a reminder, however difficult and dark life may seem at times, there still are reasons to be grateful.

The first Thanksgiving, after all, came in hard times.

It was a celebration of the first harvest brought in by the European immigrants who had settled here in America nearly 400 years ago. Those immigrants had come to an unknown land, one filled with dangers and terrors that had to load their waking and sleeping hours with worry. They had cut themselves off from the world they had known, leaving behind family and friends.

They were alone in a place far from home, strangers in a strange land.

Yet they took solace in the most basic reality of existence. Things grow from the earth, even in unknown places. Life renews itself, even during challenging days.

All reasons to be grateful.

The first time Thanksgiving was declared an ongoing and official federal holiday was in November 1863. Just days after he delivered the Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln called for the fourth Thursday in November to be a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise.”

In his famed speech at one of this nation’s bloodiest battlefields, Lincoln tried to make sense of a war that had set brothers and cousins, friends and neighbors, at each other’s throats.

Because Lincoln’s short speech has established itself in the grand American canon, many people read it now as a triumphal pronouncement, an assertion of the human spirit’s determination to walk free in a free land.

But it’s also possible to see it as something else, a stricken exploration by a troubled man of the troubled times in which he lived, a desperate grasping for meaning by a soul humbled, even overwhelmed, by the horror and grief that surrounded him.

Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation must be seen in that spirit and that context. The great emancipator was saying, with the humility of a man who had learned the hardest way possible that events can overwhelm even the hardiest of souls, that even the harshest soil can become home to seeds of gratitude.

The deaths of Americans by the tens of thousands, for example, can bring forth a new birth of freedom.

Sacrifices today can produce blessings in days to come.

For that reason, thanksgiving can be – must be – a complex thing.

This holiday is yet another troubled time.

As I write this, more than 250,000 Americans have lost their lives to the coronavirus pandemic. Another thousand – and sometimes more – die each day.

We Americans are divided, angry, scared.

Most of us would love to gather with loved ones, to embrace both them and those simple pleasures we not so long ago took as a matter of course.

But to do so is dangerous, especially to those we love who are the most vulnerable.

At my house this year, my wife, our children and I will mark the holiday ourselves as many, perhaps most, Americans will. The four of us will dine alone. We will reach out to our larger family and to friends by phone and through video chats.

It won’t be the same, but at least we’ll know those we love are still there.

More to the point, we’ll practice thanksgiving at its most basic level.

We will be grateful that, even in strange times, the things that matter endure.

And, like Lincoln, we will be humbled by the timeless lesson that hard choices today can lead to better tomorrows.

Happy Thanksgiving.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.