It is a beautiful, crisp Thanksgiving morning here at Potlatch with the sun just starting to peep through the trees. It’s been cold recently for these parts with the weather hovering around the freezing mark. The flowers, especially the hibiscus and impatiens, have been dispatched for the season, but there has not been a hard freeze yet to freeze the dogs water pail.

Enclosed is a Thanksgiving greeting from the Ottawa Citizen forwarded by my friend George up in Almonte, Ontario, where the temperatures have dipped seriously cold. It’s an upbeat piece, something we can all use in these times of strife and uncertainty. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

• Ottawa Citizen
• November 25, 2021
• ANDREW COHEN Washington Andrew Cohen is a journalist, professor at Carleton University and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.

There is a sign hanging above a lunch counter in Eastern Market, soothing in this land of shaken fists and raised voices: “Thank you, President Biden, America is on the move!”

It’s unusual, this note of appreciation, for a president under attack. It reminds us of something important. Whatever the Minutemen mobilizing to make America great again, there are Samaritans marching to make America grateful again.

Gratitude resonates in this country, whatever its swelling catalogue of grievance and resentment. And no more so than this time every year, on the fourth Thursday of November.

Thanksgiving is the most important holiday in the national calendar. More secular than religious, it’s a time for Americans to gather, talk, feast — and shop.

Coloured by commerce, Thanksgiving remains fundamentally about giving thanks. As the United States slips into a harder, coarser, louder version of itself, Thanksgiving invites us to salute its strengths, acknowledge its blessings and summon its better angels.

Americans have much to appreciate. It begins with geography, perhaps Earth’s choicest piece of real estate, a divine mix of mountain, forest, plain, wetland, even jungle and tundra.

Much as this country is threatened by climate change, most of the world wants its natural bounty. America produces food, digs minerals, harvests forests. It still has room to grow, an instinct common to Canadians but foreign to Europeans.

Spanning a continent, the United States has only two neighbours, neither a threat. It has oceans that separate it physically and psychologically from the world. The Pacific and Atlantic made isolationism easy.

A gifted and imaginative people, the Americans explored and settled the wilderness, pushing through the railroad and the telegraph. (They displaced Native Americans and enslaved Blacks, which the country barely acknowledges and for which it doesn’t apologize.)

This allowed the U.S. to embrace technology and create industry — to lace the continent with track, dig canals, send airplanes into the sky, fire rockets into space and build automobiles to buzz along the Interstate Highway System.

Americans celebrate Thanksgiving as a people of plenty. They are fabulously wealthy, so wealthy, a people that can have virtually anything they want.

For this foreigner, who has seen 46 states, lingering in some and living in others, there is much to appreciate here.

Is it the land? I give thanks for green creases of the Mississippi Delta; the frothy waters of Penobscot Bay; the noirish White Mountains of New Hampshire and “America’s Loneliest Road,” winding through ochre, sun-baked flatlands of the southwest. And all those glorious national parks: Acadia, Glacier, Mesa Verde, Zion, Yosemite, Arches. In the land of hyperbole, they are the real thing. The Grand Canyon is grand.

Is it the cities? The gentility of Boston; the quirkiness of Los Angeles, the majesty of Washington; the grittiness of Detroit.

Is it the culture? The West’s In-Out Burger, the oysters at Old Ebbitt Grill, the (once) glorious 28 flavours of Howard Johnson’s, M&Ms and Woolworth’s cupcakes.

Is it the icons? The humility of Abraham Lincoln, the empathy of Franklin Roosevelt, the ambition of the Kennedys. The decency of George H.W. Bush and John McCain. The competence of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. The courage of Myrlie and Medgar Evers, John Lewis and Martin Luther King.

The Freedom Riders. The Code-Talkers. The Tuskegee Airmen. The 20th Maine Infantry Regiment and the 82nd Airborne Division. The Battle of Midway. The Smithsonian.

Venus and Serena Williams. The Hannibal Cavemen. Slow-cooked ribs. Herman Wouk, William Styron, Nina Simone, The Supremes, Ken Burns, Walter Cronkite. The Twist and the Triple. Mrs. Maisel and Mr. Rogers. Mad Men and Little Women.

Oh, America. Your sins, your calamities, your laments — class warfare, racial tension, Iraq and Afghanistan, paranoia, disinformation, dysfunction, profanity, obesity and ebbing democracy — all those are for another day.

On Thanksgiving, you give thanks — and so do we.