This year is certainly moving along rapidly. So much so that it nearly escaped me that this weekend is Thanksgiving. It wasn’t until Tuesday morning, when I was about to write this column on another topic, that I realized quite by accident that Thanksgiving is nearly upon us.
Thanksgiving is my favourite of the holidays, and it falls conveniently during autumn, my favourite time of year. The arrival of October brings with it cooler air, a colourful display provided by the numerous trees which surround us, and the beginnings of preparations for the long, cold winter that is to come. Though this autumn has been warmer than usual, this week has been cooler, and the trees are beginning to show off their fabulous fall colours, something that always brings me joy.
Over this long weekend families will gather for festive meals, many of which will include the traditional turkey and all the fixings. It’s a time to come together and celebrate all that we are thankful for, not the least of which is the local harvest.
Many families have a tradition on Thanksgiving of sharing the things for which they are thankful. For me, that tradition is sharing those thoughts with our readers on this page each year.
Next month is the 15th anniversary of this little community newspaper. I am thankful each day for the readers who pick up our paper each week, or visit our website to catch up on the goings on in our community. I am also thankful to our advertisers, without whom it would be impossible to bring local news to this community each week.
I am also very thankful for my friends. As an introvert, I keep my circle of friends quite small, and I am certainly very appreciative of the close friends in my life who I love like many love their own families.
The older I get, the more I appreciate genuine friendship, and I count myself fortunate to have a couple of very close friends in my life, whom I can always count on, and they can always count on me.
As always, when I look around the world, I am very thankful to be living in the relative safety and security that is Canada. Sure, we have our issues, but I would challenge anyone to suggest a better place to live. All one needs to do is to spend an hour or two scouring international news in order to appreciate the gift we have been given simply by living here.
As I hop from news website to news website this week, I find myself thankful that we do not have to endure hurricanes in our neck of the woods. As I wrote in our print newspaper last week (The 3Rs…Rants, Raves & Rumours, October 3, 2024), Hurricane Helene, a powerful category 4 storm, battered Florida’s Gulf coast less than two weeks ago.
Hurricane Helene was a massive storm. When I first tuned in to live coverage of the hurricane, I was immediately struck by just how much area the storm occupied on the maps being shown. Major wind and flood damage extended well north into Georgia and the Carolinas, and even into Tennessee as the major hurricane lost strength after hitting land. But it was still a strong tropical storm by the time it was impacting Atlanta, Georgia, well north of the Gulf Coast. Helene was a very large system, with the National Hurricane Centre noting in multiple forecasts that the forecast storm radii were “at the 90th percentile of hurricane size at similar latitudes”. The sustained winds as the category 4 hurricane made landfall were a powerful 220 kilometres per hour, causing a large storm surge on top of the enormous amount of rain that the storm was generating. The destruction from the hurricane stretched a whopping 1,000 kilometres north of the coast, and it was deadly, with more than 225 deaths reported as a result of the storm.
Helene was the eighth Category 4 or 5 Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. in the last eight years. That’s as many of these intense hurricanes as hit the U.S. in the prior 57 years. Our climate certainly seems to be changing, and these large and destructive storms are becoming more and more common.
As I warned in my column in last week’s print paper, there were concerns that another hurricane would soon form in the same gulf coast area, and this week I have been watching Hurricane Milton develop. As I write this column, it has accelerated into a powerful category 5 storm, though it is expected to weaken slightly before making landfall, which it will have done by the time you read this editorial.
So for the second time is just a couple of weeks, Florida is dealing with the devastation of yet another major hurricane. Hurricane Helene was reported to be a $30 billion storm, and with another plowing through the state less than two weeks later, the impacts will be potentially horrifying.
So, I am very thankful that hurricanes are not something that we have to deal with in our neck of the woods; we have enough problems on our plates thank you very much.
Destructive storms aside, I am also thankful that we can lay our heads on our pillows each night without having to fear bombs dropping from the sky, or tanks rolling through our neighbourhoods in the morning. I can’t imagine the sheer terror that some are forced to endure in war-ravaged nations, where tomorrow is much more uncertain than the tomorrows we look forward to here in the safe land we know as Canada.
Though we of course have our worries and frustrations, they often pale in comparison to the worries and frustrations experienced elsewhere, and for that I think we should all be thankful.
As I wrote on this page a couple of years ago, “In short, I am thankful for the opportunity to be thankful at all; not everywhere in the world provides the conditions in order to be thankful. I would imagine that it is much more difficult to be thankful as bombs are dropping on your town, or while terrorists are waging war on your government. I would think that it is more challenging to express thanks if you and your family are slowly starving to death in the midst of a drought. I am certain that it would be difficult to feel thankful if you were sent to a work camp for expressing disagreement with your government.”
So, we truly do have it very good here in Canada if we take an honest look around the world.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers. I hope this long weekend brings you much joy.
