four f’s of thanksgiving
So it’s Thanksgiving this week. In general, I try to be pretty conscientious of things I’m thankful for, and if you’ve read this blog with any sort of regularity, you’ll probably notice that a lot of times I’ll write about things I’m thankful for. So I guess even though this is supposed to be a special Thanksgiving post, it’s not really any different from any other blog post on any other day.
My Thanksgiving holiday started a bit early this year. The boss let us out early on Wednesday. My parents were in town, so I met up with them at the Crocker Museum.
Here’s a picture of my parents in my favorite room at the Crocker Museum, the California room. Even though the pictures in this room stay the same, I come to appreciate this room more and more every time I come back, because there are more and more scenes that I recognize from my travels in California. This time around I noticed that there was a painting of Mount Whitney– it’s probably always been there, but I’d never noticed it because I haven’t been to Mount Whitney since this year.
We went to Crocker to see the Norman Rockwell museum. My mom’s a big fan of Norman Rockwell– I remember she used to collect plates that had some of his most famous prints on them. Norman Rockwell is probably most famous for his Saturday Evening Post covers– the museum had prints of all of the covers he painted.
My favorite Norman Rockwell paintings are the ones that showcase American life in a somewhat humorous or ironic way.
I didn’t know that he was a pretty great portrait painter too. His portraits of Kennedy and Nixon were pretty impressive.
After our tour of the Crocker Museum, my parents went home and I drove down to Elk Grove for Ray’s surprise birthday party. “So say we all.” (A quote from Battlestar Galactica. It was written on the cake.)
On Thanksgiving morning I ran the “Run to Feed the Hungry.” I was really dreading it, because Nga-Man had signed me up for the 10k. Thankfully the 10k started while we were waiting in line for the bathroom, so we ended up running the 5k.
After the run I drove down to San Francisco to have Thanksgiving dinner with my family. It’s funny, for most people Thanksgiving is all about the turkey, but in my family Thanksgiving is just as much about crab. Last year the crab fisherman were on strike, so we didn’t have any, thankfully this year we were able to return to our tradition of eating crab on Thanksgiving. My mom went pretty overboard this year, we had turkey, crab and ham, along with all the usual Thanksgiving sides. There was a ton of leftovers, which will be keeping my tummy tubby for the next few days…
So anyways, going back to Norman Rockwell–One of his most famous paintings is a picture of a happy family on Thanksgiving. The picture is titled “Freedom From Want.” It’s part of a series of paintings called the four freedoms, which were inspired by president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address, which is also known as the Four Freedoms Speech. It must have been a pretty good speech, since it inspired not only those four famous paintings, but later also is the precursor to the United Nation’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
So anyways I’ll loosely follow that theme, but instead of four freedoms I’ll write about four things I’m thankful for (which all happen to start with the letter F.)
The first is Family. I’m pretty blessed by my family and I definitely take them for granted.
The second is Friends. My life is pretty happy because I have good friends. I probably don’t say that enough.
The third is Fitness. After running only five kilometers my legs were pretty sore, so I realized that I definitely take my health and fitness for granted. I should do more to stay healthy.
The fourth is Food. Food is obviously a big part of the Thanksgiving celebration. I realize that “Freedom from Want” describes me pretty well. I’ve never been lacking for food (and definitely have the belly to show for it.) Not having to worry about going hungry is a huge blessing we often take for granted.
