Category: Thankfulness

Thankful, consciousness, humble

Food For Families

Central Florida volunteers gather at a local High School every Thanksgiving Day morning to pick up and deliver boxes of food to needy Families.

Tomorrow will be our tenth year of this Thanksgiving Day family tradition.

A decade ago, and even before Cheryl was pregnant, I suggested to her that we find a way to show our children that we are here to serve and not to be served.

This is a simple, and seemingly insignificant act of kindness influences our thinking, and our actions, all year long.

A Publix Grocery Store Produce manager started Food For Families many years ago.  With help from Central Florida Churches, Schools, and community members, needy Families are identified.

The Central Florida Community also delivers Food for Families on Christmas morning and Easter morning, providing us opportunities to put others first on three special days where we traditionally didn’t.

Family Traditions

Family traditions help form a bond.  Traditions help give stability to people in a crazy, often times confusing world.

Traditions help families know who they are and what their family believes in.

Traditions help give order, and establish priorities.

Family traditions teach.  And mark the passage of time.

Family traditions celebrate.

Daily, weekly, monthly, seasonally, annually.

Family traditions are one of the most powerful midlife parenting tools available. But only if you focus on them. Ya with me?

Thanksgiving Tradition Cancelled?

“Dad, would you cancel Thanksgiving?”, my son responded brilliantly to my serious-sounding question.

I had just antagonistically asked him, “We don’t need to go to Twistee Treat today.  I mean, we can skip one Monday.  It’s no big deal, right?  What’s one Monday?”

Five years ago, I spontaneously suggested to our son, as we were leaving his school, that we stop by Twistee Treat on the way home. “Let’s get some ice cream and celebrate a great week and kick off a great weekend ahead.”

What child turns down ice cream, right?  The very next Friday, as we where leaving his school, he asked, “Are we getting ice cream?”  We all know how this turned out.

Every Friday, for more than a year, was Twistee Treat day.

Until one casual Monday, when I said, “Why don’t we go to Twistee Treat and celebrate the great weekend we just had and kick off the week ahead?”

So here we are, five years later. Do you think he’ll have trouble recalling ice cream with his Dad?  I mean, for as long as he lives?

Boundarylessness Thanks

Read this carefully, Boundary-less-ness.

Pretty cool.  Saw it engraved on a trophy at somebody’s desk a few days ago.

Clever, isn’t it, to engrave it on a bronze plate and put it on a trophy? No boundaries.  No limits. Nice reminder.

However, it doesn’t seem worth the effort to try something without limits, simply because it’s probably, if not entirely, impossible.

Why waste time on something that can’t be done?

But thankfulness, now that’s a completely different story. Anyone can give thanks.  For anything.

There is never a point where we can’t go farther with our thankfulness. Ever.  If you challenge this, I’ll challenge you. You see, every day you wake and try to tell me I’m wrong, is one more thing you can be thankful for – breathe in your nostrils and the ability to make a choice.