Thanksgiving is just a week away.

Our clan will gather at the farm and sit down at the Thanksgiving table to a feast of roast turkey, ham and all the fixins’, including a slice — or maybe two — of pumpkin pie. We’ll thank God from whom all blessings flow, feast and enjoy being together.

Afterward, we’ll walk, nap and maybe watch a little football.

It’s good that Thanksgiving is a calendar day. It serves to remind us to be grateful and perhaps gives us an incentive to express our gratitude to those, including God, to whom it is owed. I keep a stash of “thank you” notes in a desk drawer for just that reason.

The simplest gesture of kindness — a door held open for us, a space created for us to enter into a line of heavy traffic — is to be received with gratitude and acknowledged. To fail in this regard demonstrates a lack of common courtesy, thoughtlessness and maybe even an arrogant indifference toward others. It even discounts the person extending the courtesy.

It is important that we cultivate the grace of thanksgiving in our relationships with God and each other.

Each of us has something for which to be thankful. What better time than Thanksgiving to acknowledge it?

Thanks for taking the time to read this article, and have a Happy Thanksgiving!