More Than Turkeys and Parades: 10 Ways to Incorporate Gratitude and Giving into Thanksgiving
If we put in just a bit of effort to make meaningful moments of connection and gratitude happen, they will
The holiday season seems to both elongate and accelerate each year. As soon as the Halloween candy is distributed, consumed, or donated, thoughts turn to Thanksgiving menu planning and holiday gift shopping. As an advocate for family and youth service, I’m trying to take my own advice: slow down and make time to insert small acts of kindness, generosity, and service into these hectic days.
These efforts ground us in gratitude, helping to lower the volume of the stress and reminding us of what really matters at the end of another challenging year. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, amidst hosting duties and meal preparation, finding time for service may seem like just another item to add to your growing to-do list. But with a little planning and an open heart, you can ensure a more meaningful holiday season for your family through the creation of service traditions.
The Thanksgiving holiday provides the perfect opportunity to start. Whether your children are toddlers or teenagers, it’s never too early or too late to begin incorporating family service traditions into the way you acknowledge Thanksgiving. It is a time when people gather together and hopefully appreciate the comfort of rituals, home, food, and family.
While this combination may create stress — because let’s face it, too much family time can be hard — it is also a moment when we can stop and consider the positive things in our lives: the food on our table, the roof over our head, good health, the presence of loving family and friends. As gratefulness guru Brother David Steindl-Rast famously said, it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.
Thanksgiving is also a uniquely food-centered occasion, which brings the issues of hunger and food insecurity to the forefront. According to the USDA, more than 38 million people, including 12 million children, in the United States are food insecure. The pandemic has increased food insecurity among families with children and communities of color, who were already facing hunger at much higher rates before the pandemic.
If there was ever an ideal moment for you and your children to get engaged in a critical social justice issue, this is it. Everyone can appreciate the importance of having enough nutritious food to eat and the impact being hungry has on health, well-being, learning, and happiness. Above and beyond simply doing a good deed for Thanksgiving, your family can learn about hunger and food insecurity and begin to make an impact in your own community.
Here are 10 simple things you can do to bring gratitude and giving to your Thanksgiving holiday:
1. Volunteering with your kids at an organization that feeds the hungry is a great way to begin a day of feasting.
Most food pantries, soup kitchens, and food delivery organizations offer timeslots early in the morning on Thanksgiving so that you can work a shift and still get home in time to take your turkey out of the oven. If it’s too hard to find time on the day itself, most nonprofits begin preparations for Thanksgiving well in advance and you may be able to volunteer in the days leading up to the holiday. If you are unsure where you might volunteer in your community, Feeding America offers a “find your local foodbank” database on its website.
2. If you are able, all of these organizations would welcome your financial support as well.
Your money goes towards purchasing turkeys and other Thanksgiving foods, and you may be able to donate frozen turkeys, canned goods, or supermarket gift cards yourself.
3. A nice way to involve young children in the philanthropic process is to ask them to go through your own pantry and count up all of the items he or she finds there.
Then donate some amount (a penny, a nickel, a dollar — whatever you can afford) for each item, letting kids flex their empathy muscles as well as their math skills.
4. In advance of the holiday, your family can create colorful Thanksgiving cards, hand-print turkeys, decorated paper placemats, or delivery bags.
Donate them to your local meals-on-wheels program, food pantry, or soup kitchen. These items are typically welcome as they are used to brighten the food packages that are distributed around the holiday.
5. No matter how old the children at your table are, a hands-on kindness activity will keep little (and big) hands busy while dinner is being prepared, and infuse kindness into your holiday.
Before you begin, you might consider reading aloud a few books on indigenous peoples and the Native American experience to help deepen your families understanding of the day. Some classic titles include The Very First Americans by Cara Ashrose, Giving Thanks: A Native American Morning Message by Chief Jake Swamp, The Circle of Thanks: Native American Poems and Songs of Thanksgiving by Joseph Bruchac, and Fry Bread by Kevin Noble Maillard.
A few hands-on kindness activities to consider:
6. Start a Gratitude Jar tradition.
Research has proven that simply expressing gratitude — saying what you are thankful for out loud, or writing it down — makes us feel happier and more grateful. What better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than to encourage public expressions of gratitude. Distribute colorful slips of paper and ask everyone to write down one or two things for which they are thankful, making sure that they sign and date each one. Place the notes in a glass jar and place it at the center of your table. At the beginning of your Thanksgiving meal each year, read a few of the notes from the year before.
7. In the spirit of a wonderful organization called Kids for Peace and its “Love Links” initiative, your family can create a paper chain.
This can be used to decorate your Thanksgiving table, your fireplace mantle or to be hung on your Christmas tree. Cut strips of colorful recycled paper, about 15 inches long by 1.5 inches wide. Ask family members to decorate the strips with words of love, gratitude, and kindness. Staple the links together to create a paperchain.
8. Give everyone folded plain note cards and markers or crayons.
Ask guests to create colorful holiday greetings for our active-duty military and veterans, for hospitalized children or isolated elders, or for our frontline heroes.
9. Good old-fashioned arts and crafts projects bring joy and keep kids busy while they are considering their blessings.
You can find lots of printable coloring sheets online that allow kids to color a turkey, listing the things they are thankful for on each of his tail feathers. Or encourage children to create colorful placemats for each person at your Thanksgiving table, describing all of the things they love and appreciate about that person.
10. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, work with your kids to paint “kindness rocks.”
You can find the Kindness Rocks Project on social media to learn more about their effort. Give children flat, smooth rocks and oil-based paints and encourage them to paint hopeful, kind, grateful, and encouraging messages on them. After your Thanksgiving feast, while some folks nap or watch television, take a walk around your neighborhood and leave the rocks where neighbors will find them.
Beyond the travel, planning, family drama, and food preparation, Thanksgiving provides a unique opportunity, right at the start of a whirlwind holiday season, to pause, take a breath, and center ourselves. Maybe this Thanksgiving in particular, after the challenging year we’ve all experienced and we continue to search for those elusive silver linings, is the perfect time to let go of the way we’ve always celebrated.
Maybe it’s time for some new traditions. If we remain open to the possibility that meaningful moments of connection and gratitude can happen, and we put in just a bit of effort to make them happen, they will. And wouldn’t that make us all a little more thankful?
Natalie Silverstein, MPH, is an author, speaker, consultant, and passionate advocate for family and youth service. Her first book, Simple Acts: The Busy Family’s Guide to Giving Back, was published in 2019. Her second book, Simple Acts: The Busy Teen’s Guide to Making a Difference will be published in early 2022. Natalie is the New York coordinator of Doing Good Together, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit. In this role, she curates a free monthly e-mail listing of family-friendly service opportunities distributed to thousands of subscribers. Her personal and parenting essays have appeared on a variety of blogs including Grown and Flown, Red Tricycle, Motherwell, and Mommypoppins. She is a frequent public speaker and podcast guest. Natalie holds a master’s degree in public health from Yale. She lives in New York City with her husband and three children.
