A Thanksgiving Litany

(Back in November of 1982 Gordon Greer, Editor at Large of Better Homes and Gardens wrote this wonderful Thanksgiving piece after a serious medical scare. I was so struck by it that I adapted it for a litany for a Thanksgiving service. Here it is. And--special thanks to Gordon Greer I used six readers from the congregation and the choir.)

Leader: One November several years ago the Editor of Better Homes and Gardens wrote his own Thanksgiving prayer. He had just found out good news from a hospital lab report. Let us, in his words, express our own Thanksgiving. We are thankful for:

1.Sitting on the porch watching the light face and listening to the ball game on the radio...

2. The total joy on my daughter's face when she makes a nice cut on her water ski sending up a spray that shines like ten million diamonds...

3. Halloween pumpkins...

4. Fourth of July fireworks; Sunday evening cookouts under sprawling old shade trees...

5. Driving with the top down on my old Chevy;

6.  Hammocks...Rocking chairs...Bicycle rides...

Choir: We Give You Thanks.

1. Holding hands and walking down to the ice-cream store...

2. Early morning fog...a low harvest moon...

3. The scraggly little mutt we  adopted from Death Row at the Dog pound...

4.  Fireflies...Blue-jays...

5. Picking out folk songs on an  acoustic guitar...

6y. Hot dogs...Strawberries...Tomatoes from the garden...

Choir: We give You Thanks.

1. Putting together a good set of tennis, win or lose...

2. "When, in the course of human events..."

3. Stained-glass windows...Campgrounds at dusk...
4. The excitement of big cities...
5. Back roads between small towns...

6. Dahlias and daisies and even dandelions...

Choir: We Give You Thanks.

1. Doonesbury...Snoopy...Clear moonlit nights...

2. The thousands of poignant memories stretching back through four decades evoked by the playing of the   national anthem at any sports event...

3.  Late afternoon sunlight on a freshly mowed lawn...

4. The exuberance of the kids you see at high school football games...

5. "And dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal..."

6. True friends...old houses...hot cider beside the fireplace...

Choir: We Give You Thanks.

1. "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together..."

2. The sounds of church bells and wind chimes and crickets and cellos and the soothing slap of waves against the sides of anchored boats...

3.  The season's first snowfall...

4. Vacations in warm places...

5. Browsing in bookstores...and smell of homemade bread...

6. Spending a whole weekend with no phone calls ...

Choir: We Give you Thanks.

1. Nature's ingenuity in never duplicating a sunset...

2. Oscar Peterson at the key board...

3. "Porgy and Bess"...

4. :"We, the people of the United States...

Choir: We Thank You God.