Here's Andy Rooney's popular essay, "Thanksgiving" in celebration of the day. It's not one of those, "You want a raise?!? You're lucky we don't fire your ass!" essays, either. It makes sense.
------------------------
We need a good, quiet, low-key holiday once in awhile, and that's what Thanksgiving is.
It's unfortunate that we've diminished the importance of the word "thanks" by using it so often when we don't really mean it. We say it so many times during the average day that there isn't much left to say wen you really appreciate something someone has done for you, and want to thank him or her with a word of appreciation.
What we've done is to invent a lot of superlative forms of the word. We say "Thank you very much," "thanks a lot," "how can I ever thank you," and "thanks a million." A million what is not clear.
For the most part, polite people use these phrases as a matter of common courtesy. We can't hate people for being curteous, but, te fact is, we're filling the air with junk phrases. When the man who fills my tank with gas for $19.75 gives me my quarter change and says, "Thank you very much. Have a nice day," my inclination is to say, "I'd trade your kind words for a windshield wash."
The sign over the pump in one gas station I've been to several times says, "No charge if we fail to smile an say thank you." That's fine, but they no longer have an air pump. What I want is less thanks for my patronage and more service.
The junk phrase that has begun to irritate me is the one being uttered as a matter of course by checkout cashiers. You lug a load of groceries to the counter, unpack your cart, put it on the moving belt, and they say, "Will that be it?"
What do they mean, "Will that be it?" Of course that'll be it. If it wasn't it, I'd have picked up what was "it" and put it in front of them with everything else.
Yesterday, I bought about fourteen items in a supermarket and the cashier gave me the inevitable four words. I said, "Yes." I gave her a tewnty and a ten to pay for the $26.50 I owed. She carefully doled out my change of $3.50, and when she finished, I just stood there with the change in the palm of my hand and said, "Will that be it?"
The cashier looked at me as if I'd said, "This is a stickup."
"Will that be it?" I repeated.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"I mean," I said, "will that be it? Just like when you ask me, 'Will that be it?'"
The cashier shook her head, relieved that I was just crazy and not violent.
"Have a nice day" she said nervously, and looked at the next customer.
When it comes to the "Thanks" in Thanksgiving, I hope we don't use it without any thought to the way we so often use the word. I've often thought it ought to be called, "Appreciation Day" but I realize that just doesn't have the same fine sound to it that "Thanksgiving" does.
Most of us go through the average days and weeks of our lives using those meaningless junk phrases that ave no real thought behind them. It takes a toothache, the loss of a job, or a death in the family to make us recall how good things were when our teeth didn't ache, when we were employed, and when everyone in the family was healthy.
The trick to being happy is to stop and think occasionally, during normal times, how good things are going. At this very moment at Thanksgiving, my teeth don't hurt, I'm making a living and my family is fine. I'm just going to take the day off to sit around appreciating how lucky I am, and I hope you can do the same.