News
Thanksgiving Message
November 24, 2009
Dear Wakefield Families,
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and it starts with my favorite menu, which (with apologies to vegetarians) I would be happy to eat all year long. In part, it is the meal that recommends the event. Surrounded by family, I relish the days off from school, the time spent catching up, and the preparation for a dinner whose only purpose is to be thankful together. Certainly there is much for which we can be thankful, even in the midst of the ills which command public attention and the personal sadness with which we all deal from year to year. But those at our tables on Thursday are not the only ones for whom we are thankful.
Thanksgiving may be the most patriotic of U.S. holidays after Independence Day, but it did not begin as an American holiday. The first occasion of our Thanksgiving was celebrated by Englishmen six generations before anyone could denote a country using the name United States of America. Today we look back on our first Thanksgiving and the successful struggles since then seem manageable because they were successful. In truth, our national success was never inevitable, and it never will be.
What we have and what we have accomplished exist because of individual choices, sacrifices, failures, and triumphs made by some whose names we know, and some whose names we will never know. For all of them and their gifts to us we are thankful – including the gift of this school. Partly in gratitude for the choices, sacrifices, failures, and ultimate triumphs of our predecessors, we have for many years chosen Thanksgiving as the time for Grandparents’ Day. In the most immediate sense, where would we all be without our grandparents? We celebrate our grandparents’ role in our lives: “The founders of our immediate families, the first heroes of our youth, and the enduring framework of our lives.”
But who are the others, not at our own tables, whom we should remember with our thanks? They are friends, neighbors, fathers, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, and mothers serving overseas, working in police and fire departments, and hospitals, allowing the rest of us to enjoy that meal I mentioned in the first sentence. They were teachers who would not tolerate ignorance; they were doctors who would not tolerate disease; they were lawyers who would not tolerate injustice; they were engineers who would not tolerate incapacity.
Recall the lines from Ecclesiasticus, in which the author, having commanded, “Let us now praise famous men,” continues, “some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten.” Are there not such people in our lives, our national background, and in the ancestry of everyone you know?
On Thanksgiving Day 2009, give thanks not only for those whom you know deserve thanks, but also for those who never would know you, but dreamed of the life you would lead.
Gratefully,
Peter A. Quinn