Thanksgiving, in all its imperfect glory

Thanksgiving has a way of sneaking up on you — not just on the calendar, but in the deeper corners of life, where change collects quietly until you realize the old norms don't quite fit anymore. Some years it feels like a Norman Rockwell painting; other years it's more like a half-finished puzzle missing pieces the dog probably chewed. But somewhere inside that unevenness, gratitude still shows up — sometimes uninvited, sometimes undeserved, often disguised as something simpler than we expected. I've spent enough holidays to know that the idea of Thanksgiving rarely matches the lived experience. Often, the obligations in life don't correlate to the arbitrary dates we pick to celebrate. In my early days as a junior officer, I spent numerous "holidays" commanding a Border Camp (on the former West German border) so that married officers could spend time with their families. Mine was back in the (united) states, and I ate my turkey dinner in the mess hall. Many of our experiences don't "pop" into being. They just morph — incrementally, stubbornly and rarely on our schedule. And this year is shaping up to be one of "those" years. The kids (my three) are heading with their mother to my sister's house. I'm grateful they'll be surrounded by family, though it leaves my own house a little quieter than I'd like. It's not clear whether Barb's kids will join, and that uncertainty creates an odd limbo: planning for Thanksgiving while also planning for the possibility of not really having one. So we've tossed around the idea of heading to Hilton Head in the RV. Sun, sand and a parking pad may not be the classic "passing the platter" experience, but then again, what is classic anymore? As I've come to realize, traditions are increasingly shaped by circumstances rather than intention. What once felt like a fixed ritual (family in one place, predictable rhythms) now bends to school breaks, airline prices, and the centrifugal pull of adult children living their own lives. Our traditions are becoming what circumstances dictate. You can fight reality for only so long before you recognize the futility of the effort. But even amid the shifting ground, gratitude finds its foothold (it always has). For years I tried to explain life through the easy formula of cause and effect: I worked hard, therefore good things happened. Randomness filled the gaps. Clean, controlled, self-contained. Except it wasn't true. At least not fully. Not even mostly. Which evokes the notion: If everything good in life was simply my own doing, then who exactly was I supposed to thank on Thanksgiving? Myself? Evolution (good luck for not turning me into a frog)? God? Life has taken too many detours for me to pretend I'm the master cartographer. I don't have the map, and half the time I'm not even sure which trail I'm on. Yet the path has always revealed itself, eventually. And those brief moments of clarity (those small, stubborn flashes of Grace) are worth celebrating. Worth remembering. Worth giving thanks for. Years ago, when the kids were younger and still home for the entire holiday rather than just some snippet of it, Thanksgiving felt fuller, more visible. I wrote then about the particular joy of having them not out of obligation but out of desire (how your heart can soar when your kids choose to be with you simply because they want to). Those were precious days: golf rounds in unseasonably warm weather, food comas in a living room littered with sweatpants, the lazy serenity of a house filled with the comfortable noise of family. When they left, I tucked them away in my memory (pictures — sharp, bright, high-definition moments). I still carry them. But seasons change. Children grow. Families blend and re-blend. The pie of time gets sliced into ever more pieces. And some years (like this one) the house falls quiet before the holiday even arrives. And yet, I find myself thankful. Thankful for God's Grace that shows up when I least warrant it, free sovereign favor to the ill-deserving. Thankful that even in years where Thanksgiving is more concept than event, the feeling behind it remains. Thankful that my kids are healthy, building lives of their own. Thankful that Barb's kids are growing into themselves, and that somehow, between two households and numerous ZIP codes, we've formed something that resembles a family — not traditional, not seamless, but deeply ours. Thankful for the mornings when I actually stop long enough to notice the world unfolding: the pink sky, the low mist, the kind of quiet beauty that C.S. Lewis described as a "messenger from something greater than ourselves." And thankful, too, for the chance that maybe this year's Thanksgiving will look like none before it. Maybe Hilton Head will offer the kind of peace that a crowded house never could. Maybe we'll create a new tradition without meaning to (like so many others I've stumbled into). The truth is, the real meaning of Thanksgiving doesn't live in the turkey, or the table, or even the people around it (though they matter more than I often admit). It lives in the recognition that we are not entirely in control, that much of what blesses us isn't earned, and that even the quiet, empty years are part of a larger plan unfolding in ways we only half understand. So whatever shape this Thanksgiving takes (RV, beach breeze, kids scattered across states), I'll take it. I'll be grateful for the Grace I see, and even more for the Grace I don't. And I'll wish that same Grace for everyone else trying to make sense of a holiday that never quite comes out of the oven the way the recipe promised. Happy Thanksgiving. Dave Clark is an entrepreneur and a former Kingsport alderman.