For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.

My sons half recite, half mumble these words. It is our nightly ritual before dinner. Or at least on the nights we don’t forget or are too rushed to bother. But we do try.

Saying grace before our evening meal is something I introduced to our family when the kids were still young. Although we aren’t a particularly observant family, I thought it important to think about the fact we had food on the table. I wanted my children to understand early on that not every child was so lucky (even in our large and mostly affluent city) and that they should have a feeling of gratitude for living in a household that has always had “enough.”

In my house growing up, grace was said mostly when company was present – for me, as a kid, it felt like a bit of a show put on for special occasions. I don’t think my parents actually meant it as a show though. They were truly grateful for their good life in Canada and wanted us to share in that feeling.

My parents grew up in Germany during and after the Second World War. Both had the good fortune of growing up on small family farms in small rural villages – meaning they were neither bombed nor without a source of food. After the war was over, my mother’s family moved to a larger urban centre, but she remained reasonably well fed in the lean post-war years as a result of the fact that her father was a master butcher. He worked as a foreman in an abattoir where he always had access to meat, even if the cuts he brought home were often third rate, filled with fat and gristle. My mother does not recall going hungry, even if she didn’t always enjoy the food on offer (she remembers being repelled by the pig’s bristles being left in the fatty pork when it was served).

My father didn’t fare as well. Following the war, his family became refugees after their part of the country was ceded to Poland. They ended up living in East Germany from 1945 to 1948, before escaping to the West. Food was scarce there. As I have related previously, he recalled the occasions when he and his mother would go out to the local farmers’ fields to look for stray potatoes that the farmers had missed during the harvest. As a teenager during that time, he recalled always being hungry. He regularly recounted a story about a parcel his father (who had gone on to the West earlier than the rest of the family) sent them that was filled with just potatoes. He always concluded the story by saying it was the best gift he ever received. My eyes tear up every time I think of that story. My childhood recollections of receiving parcels from distant family are about ripping the brown paper off the dozen or so packages sent by my grandmothers from Europe each year at Christmas and finding chocolates, new clothes, dolls and toys inside. Spoiled child that I was, I know I would not have been at all impressed – and more likely mystified – had a parcel of potatoes arrived from my grandparents.

But gratitude can also be a catalyst, a call to action. Another story my father often told was about an event that occurred to him at the very end of the war. After being conscripted, at age fifteen, to go fight on the Eastern Front, he and the other youth were sent to Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1945. When the war ended on May 8^th, these teenage boys were left to their own devices to find their way home. My father managed to get himself onto a Red Cross vehicle headed westward. While still in Czechoslovakia, the convoy of trucks stopped one night in a farmer’s field. After the group took shelter in the barn, the farmer came out with two loaves of bread and a lump of butter to be shared among the refugees. My father said it didn’t occur to him until much later what a kind and noble gesture this was, given that this man and his family had lived under Nazi occupation for years. But once he understood the humanity of that action, my father vowed to repay the kind deed by finding a way to give back. He made good on that promise when he joined the local Kiwanis Club in his adopted homeland of Canada in the late 1960s. Over the forty plus years he was an active member, he worked tirelessly to raise money, help out with the local camp for less fortunate children and assist with running the local Music Festival. Right up to his late seventies, he was the biggest seller in his club of lightbulbs, cookies or whatever else was on offer in order to raise funds for the many worthwhile causes the Kiwanis Club supported.

Many endured appalling hardships during and after that war and I do not mean to make light of the immense suffering or unspeakable horrors other families endured as a result of the Nazi atrocities. My point is that too many of us have forgotten the lessons of gratitude. It was drilled into me as a child, as I now attempt to pass down that lesson to my kids. To this day, my mother (now of diminished capacity due to dementia) will say unsolicited that we are a lucky family to have sufficient financial means and a safe place to live. And every time I slip into my clean warm bed on a cold winter’s night, I think of the homeless people surviving on the streets and count my blessings.

So when I make my boys say grace, it is not a platitude. I want them to feel gratitude and realize how fortunate and privileged their lives are in this beautiful and peaceful country of ours. We have so much for which to be thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving!