Alan Weiss’s Monday Morning Memo® – 11/24/25
I seem to feel this way every year, but Thanksgiving always causes me to come to a “full stop” at least briefly, and reflect on how fortunate I am. Despite the flaws, we live in a marvelous country in the US, and I’m sure those of you in other climes feel the same way about yours.
We seem to shed bad times, poor governments, natural disasters, and foreign threats the way my Shepherd sheds fur. The detritus is all over but we’re healthy and can sweep up the mess.
Thanksgiving was thought to begin in 1621 when a Native American man named Squanto, who spoke English because he had been enslaved, helped the Pilgirms (Protestants fleeing persecution in Europe) plant corn. He also helped them learn to fish on land that had been his tribe's, the Patuxet, before they were killed by smallpox.
Then in 1621 came a banner harvest, so sometime between September and November, the settlers celebrated with a feast that lasted three days drawing from their harvest and food from the Wampanoag tribe, the larger tribe that the Patuxet was a band of.
Abraham Lincoln established it as an annual national holiday by proclamation in 1863, largely due to the efforts of Sarah Josepha Hale, and later, Congress passed a law in 1941, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that fixed the holiday to the fourth Thursday of November.
We complain, we’re cynical, we feel unfairly treated at various times and in various circumstances. Some people are seldom that way and some are always that way. Try to be part of the former, because the alternative is not a life at all.
And when I tell you how fortunate I am, I find that the harder I’ve worked the luckier I’ve become.
From our house to yours, Happy Thanksgiving!
Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough. —Oprah Winfrey
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. —Henry David Thoreau
If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share. —W. Clement Stone (This was the man who fired me in 1985! He was worth at the time $400 million.)
Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence. —Erma Bombeck
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Duke Merhavy
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, too, Alan!
Alan Weiss
Thanks, Duke, same to you!!