By Karen Stiller

One Thanksgiving I set off an unfortunate chain of events by using the food processor to mash potatoes. I ended up creating super-glue and, in the process, super-panic. I sped to the grocery store where I stocked up on boxed potato flakes and abandoned my car at the store because it wouldn’t start. I trudged home thinking that Thanksgiving had become another holiday to hate.

Why? Because I was missing the point. Thanksgiving is about gratitude. Part of that is being thankful for who your family is (in all its chaotic glory) and even who you are (in all your culinary ineptitude).

It’s also being thankful for the role you play in the world at large—even if you never feel you are doing enough. And for my family, it’s about directing our gratitude to God who we believe is active and present in our lives and in the world. So really, spending three days in tears while I try to fold napkins in the shape of a turkey is not healthy. At least not for me.

This year, my family is trying to do a few simple things that hook into the warm nature of what faith and gratitude look like in the first place.

Put Everyone to Work
I kick my kids outside to husk corn, peel potatoes and face head-on the challenge of divesting turnips of that thick, unyielding skin. I try not to screech “Be thankful!” as they complain. But, given enough time and maybe a special snack, the whining turns to talking, a peel fight breaks out and my kids feel they are part of a family that works together. This is something to be grateful for.

Invite Community
This Thanksgiving we are inviting another family to join us at our cottage for a Thanksgiving meal. They will bring their kids, some food and probably a game or two. There is no better time than Thanksgiving to place the extra chairs around the long wooden table.

When we share as a family, we teach our kids that sharing is what we do. Feasting together is an ancient and Biblical thing to do. The busyness of our lives means we don’t do it enough throughout the year. Thanksgiving is a perfect time to make it happen.

Set the Table with Gratitude
We decorate our table with fallen leaves and whatever crafts our kids have lugged home from school. Then we pray. It is a longish kind of prayer that makes cooks nervous because the dinner buns are getting cold. Everyone says something they are thankful for.

I first saw this done on some American Thanksgiving special with a perfect family with perfect teeth in a huge house and thought “Perfect!”.  When we do it, it is a bit like pulling teeth. But that’s okay. We are speaking gratitude to God out loud, something that we don’t do nearly enough.

Talk About the World
People of faith should get a little uncomfortable at Thanksgiving. As we sit around a table that groans under the weight of all those sweet potatoes, we are part of a global community that includes severe poverty. We thank God for plenty, even as we acknowledge that there are an awful lot of people in the world for whom plenty means plenty of pain.

This is tough to talk about at Thanksgiving. What we do tell our kids is that God cares desperately about the world. That the God who loves us does not create the kind of suffering and dire conditions that exist—the kind that our sponsored children live in every day. It’s people who have done that. And it’s people who can undo it.

We tell them that God has given people a Thanksgiving Job of loving the world and cleaning up this mess. And for that privilege, which is actually kind of holy, we give thanks.

Make a lasting difference by sponsoring a child this Thanksgiving, click here .

Learn more about the global food crisis and how you can help.