A Psalm of Thanksgiving

Reading:                                                                           Psalm 100

A psalm. For giving grateful praise.

Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.

  Worship the Lord with gladness;
    come before him with joyful songs.
Know that the Lord is God.
    It is he who made us, and we are his;
    we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving
    and his courts with praise;
    give thanks to him and praise his name.
For the Lord is good and his love endures forever;
    his faithfulness continues through all generations (NIV).

Reflection

I am glad that we celebrate Thanksgiving in early October here in Canada. I cannot imagine waiting until late November to celebrate this holiday as Americans do. It puts Thanksgiving too close to Christmas, and it delays it too long after the harvest has been gathered. By late November, harvest time is just a distant memory, and much of the country is already in winter's icy grip. Thanksgiving is after all a harvest festival, signalling our thankfulness to God for the bounty of the earth.

When you grow up on a prairie farm, as I did, you appreciate the traditional aspects of Thanksgiving all the more. You are reminded each day that the food on your table does not simply come from a store. You are actively engaged in producing the nourishment that sustains your own life.

As a youngster I sat down to many a Thanksgiving feast, and almost all the food found on that groaning table was home-grown. I watched those vegetables growing in our garden in the hot summer sun. I even pulled the weeds from around those peas. And those mashed potatoes, I helped my mother hill those tubers in the spring and then dug them up after the frost hit in the fall.

My brother loved growing pumpkins, and mom would turn his favourite into the best pumpkin pie east of the Rockies. And how can you eat pumpkin pie without a mound of whipped cream on top? Well let me tell you, it tastes even better, when just that morning you milked the cows that produced that sweet rich cream. Oh, and that huge turkey—we'll miss that pompous strutting gobbler out by the hen house. But I'm sure we'll get over it, somehow. For now, let's just dig in.

Let's all dig in, and give thanks to the God, who made all this possible. This sumptuous feast has been brought to you by Him. Now that's Thanksgiving!

The great God in heaven has been kind to us. He has answered our prayers. He brought the warmth of spring and the rain of heaven. He caused his face to shine upon us. The rich earth responded to his touch. It brought forth its bounty, and now around this table we have gathered together as a family to celebrate God's great goodness to us.

As the psalmist declares, "It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture." So today with joy-filled hearts we enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. We give thanks to him and praise his name.

Response: Heavenly Father, thank you for all your kindness. You have been so good to us! Help us to maintain an attitude of gratitude all year long and not only on Thanksgiving Day. Amen.

 Your Turn: What blessings from God's hand are you most grateful for?

All Things Bright and Beautiful—Carolyn Wilker

When I was a little girl in Sunday School, I learned the song “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” As a five-or six-year-old, it didn’t matter who wrote the song. Neither was it important that the song was ages old, only that it was something that I cared about.

On researching this song, I see that it was written originally as a poem in the 1800s, specifically for young children. Cecil Frances Alexander wrote about flowers that open, ripe fruit in the garden, birds that sing, and how God made and loves them all. After singing the song so often in Sunday School, much of it is deeply rooted in my memory.

One line came to me as I walked through our local farmer’s market last week: “The ripe fruits in the garden, he made them everyone.” I knew what I would write about this week. Such a wonderful array of colour—the red of apples and raspberries, the green of pears, peas and beans,  pink blush on peaches, purple eggplant and so much more.

No end to the bounty from people’s gardens. It reminded me of the garden we had when I was growing up and my first garden as a young 4-H member.

Tomatoes from my garden

It’s no wonder then that I come home with plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. Peaches, apples, tomatoes, potatoes, red pepper and more.  No wonder my kitchen smells like a canning factory in summer. This summer it has already been filled with the scent of tomatoes and peaches as I made fruit relish, and cucumbers and dill for dill pickles. There will be peaches too, when I get to them.

Of course, it’s a lot of work keeping a garden. We have one at our home—very small compared to the one my mother kept, or even my garden when I was 13. We prepare the soil, cultivate and till until the soil is soft and friable. After marking out long straight rows, it’s time to plant seeds; then after the plants start to grow, the thinning and the weeding. I wondered some days if we’d ever get to the end of the row.

 There was time in the garden picking strawberries, peas or beans, and afterwards podding the peas and “snibbling” the beans. We relied on sunshine and rain for the plants to produce their fruits, then ate the produce fresh from the garden, and preserved even more for winter. The overflow we shared with our neighbours or friends who came to our garden to pick what we didn’t need and put extra food on their tables.

Additionally, for two summers our family grew cucumbers for the Matthews-Wells Company. We had green fingers, literally, from picking every other day, rain or shine. Every time we passed the pickle aisle in the grocery store for years afterwards, we remembered those hours in the garden.

At the end of a growing season, after all the harvest was in, my mother had the satisfaction of enough food stored up to feed her family until the next summer. Not too much, but enough in jars and freezer bags. Then in winter, my mother bought only those fruit or vegetables we didn’t grow, and we ate well until the next growing season.

 This morning after writing my column, I went out to my garden and picked fresh tomatoes and basil. We still rely on the sunshine and rain—and during a drought, our water barrels.  I feel that same satisfaction when harvest is in, and in winter when we eat peaches, tomatoes or beans, that we can enjoy the food before us.

 Indeed, we have many gifts from our creator who has good things in store for us.

 http://storygal.wordpress.com/

http://carolynwilker.ca/book.shtml

Harvest Begins—Carolyn Wilker

On a Wednesday evening in late July, I stand at the sink washing and cutting harvest apples into quarters to make applesauce. The very act of doing this and the smell of the apples takes me back home where Dad and I picked them a few days before, and still further back when I was a child and we helped our parents in the orchard.

“I’m climbing the tree,” Mary says. She picks up a basket and tucks it into the space between two branches, then climbs the tree, hands on the skinnier branches and her shoes gripping the bark, and hoists herself up.

I can climb that tree too, but there won’t be room for both of us. She starts, first with the apples she can reach from that crook in the centre, then leaning out further and further until she’s straddling one of the branches, tolerating its movement as my mother or someone else shakes the tree from the other side to get apples just out of reach. Exactly why I’m not climbing the tree. Mom’s not looking, or my sister would get a warning, telling her to be careful. She’s already had one broken arm.

There’s a wooden box at the base of the tree to be used as a step for shorter legs like mine. That tree is one of the few I can or will climb. Dad once built a small tree house— a platform really—for the three of us girls to play on. That seemed a little safer than shimmying out on branches.

“Time to pick,” I hear behind me, and I am reminded to get to work, even while I stand there, basket in hand. I pull apples from the branches that lean low, heavy with fruit, and I step on and around apples that have fallen. Ripe apples, some of them scabby or with worms—the bad apples. Later I will look for good ones that have fallen to the ground.

We use the better ones for making applesauce and send some to the cider mill for pressing into sweet apple cider. The cows and pigs will get a treat too, for they also like the sweetness of the apple. Our milker pails are clean, ready for the apple cider that Dad will bring home and Mom will bottle.

The apples are smaller than they once were, I reflect, as I cut them into pieces. I could pick one that fit my hand rather than two that I can hold now. Harvest apples seem rare now; one of those trees was taken down by the tornado in 1979. Dad doesn’t spray the tree anymore, and even then he was cautious, lest we eat substances that might hurt us.

I cut and quarter, tossing parts of apples that are bad. Sometimes I wonder if all the cutting and trimming is worth the time, but as the apples cook and I put them through the sieve, I smell the sweetness of the orchard at harvest time. My kitchen smells like a canning factory, just like our home where my mother spent days canning fruits and vegetables. I remember the potato pancakes Mom made when we had our first applesauce and new potatoes, and how we’d make a meal of that, maybe with some fresh peas from the garden, or a cucumber salad.

True, there was a lot of work involved, sometimes too much, yet we never went hungry. We had parents looking out for us and teaching us, and we had food to nourish our bodies. Even when crops were not so plentiful, God was caring for us and still does.

Carolyn Wilker, author of Once Upon a Sandbox