What you can expect here at ThanksgivinginFebruary.com

A weekly personal story or post, intended as inspiration for your own journey. Subscribe by email for a weekly notice of new stories, monthly digest of stories and helpful nuggets of inspiration I’ve discovered.  

My “Thanksgiving in February” mindset is:

• My choice to rejoice daily for all the gifts, particularly the gifts of kindness, the life- and soul-sustaining natural world, for those who love us, all that we love and the events that make us.
• This growing collection of stories from my search for peace. They are all love stories in one way or another. I share them to offer hope. If my family-of-origin can make some peace … well, then there’s hope for a lot of families!
• My core story of making peace with my often absentee Dad. 

Our Thanksgiving in February Dinner

For our family’s Thanksgiving-in-February tradition, my husband and I typically cook a mid-winter turkey dinner with all the fixings for 20-some family members and friends, and serve it at the nearby hunting camp that has been a gathering place for his family for many generations.

Our Thanksgiving-in-February dinner has all the traditional fixings from November: Roasted turkey and celery-bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry-orange-ginger relish plus a February twist of chocolate hearts in red foil.

And PIE!

What better way to connect with people than dinner and PIE?!

Why NOT a bonus holiday about gratitude in the dead of winter?!

Why NOT make a little peace over pie, even if it’s just for one night?!

Why NOT celebrate abundance year-round?

A little slice of the story …

 In November 2009, my Dad, David, fell ill and spent two weeks in a medical coma, battling a life-threatening infection.

He woke up just in time to eat hospital food for Thanksgiving dinner, his favorite meal of the year.

When he’d recovered, he wanted to have a thank you dinner. He wanted to thank his longtime girlfriend, Stephanie, and his two daughters who had sat vigil at the hospital. I am his elder daughter.

He wanted to thank his two ex-wives, my mother and my stepmother, who took care of his daughters, and all of his friends who had helped out that fall by raking leaves or mowing the lawn — and praying.

We’d all suffered heartbreak around my Dad. He’d made two families. In time, both were broken. So many jagged edges.

But that February night at Dad and Stephanie’s house, we set all that aside to celebrate my dad’s recovery with roasted turkey and stuffing, pie and candlelight. Read that story here.

When people from my Dad’s two shattered families all got along and laughed through dinner —

Well, then that dinner became a tiny, sweet miracle that brought me much peace. A dose of salve only possible because my Dad and I had made our peace after a long time.

This love story would not let me be. It demanded to be written and shared. So here we are.

My Peace I Give Unto You

From a beloved saying in my husband’s family: “My peace I give unto you.”

May these love stories help us rejoice in all the goodness as we search for peace in a painful, broken world — and use that inspiration to do what we can to make it better.

That’s Thanksgiving in February.