Take what you will from it, I guess.

The history of our national day of giving thanks is disputed.

It has become fashionable lately for people with (Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning" playing on infinite repeat) to tell us that Thanksgiving is a terrible celebration of the massacre of the trans-historic indigenous peoples of North America. There's quite the movement afoot to banish the holiday, or to reinvent it as a day of sorrow and atonement.

Hey, if that's all you've got in your box, then I guess it's going to rattle around a bit.

If you're an atheist, then the question arises: to whom are you giving thanks? Certainly not to God. Okay then: how about just appreciating how you got the things for which you may count among your blessings? Somebody likely helped you get there. Thank them. If you did it all by yourself, thank the person in your mirror. Saying "thank you" is polite.

I've always liked the way that William Bradford looked at Thanksgiving: as a celebration of capitalism as a way to get through the harsh winters. It seems that before, the Plymouth Bay Colony had tried collectivism of corn, and that hadn't worked out; the hardest workers got no more than the shirkers, and they had almost starved the year before. So when they tried the concept of working for one's self, and trading for whatever was needed, the colony flourished.

It is interesting to note that some of the colonists worked for the local Indians, planting and such, to get their seed corn. I've heard one reference to them working "as slaves" for the indigenous people, but slaves don't generally get to walk away with any profit for their labors. This was an exchange of labor for commodity. That yellow seed corn was truly their specie.

Here at Better And Better, we try to see the optimistic side of things*. So on this day of Thanks Giving, I'm asking you all to simply see what is good in your life, and spend at least part of the day loving that.

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*We've also been known to fail at this, on occasion.