This last week included two American traditions, one rather old and established and the other kind of new. The first is Thanksgiving and the second is Black Friday.According to Wikipedia, Thanksgiving Day is a mostly secular holiday celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada. It is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November in the US and on the second Monday of October in Canada. Because of the longstanding traditions of the holiday, the celebration often extends to the weekend that falls closest to the day it is celebrated.In the United States, the modern Thanksgiving tradition traces its origins to a 1621 celebration at Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts. The Plymouth feast and Thanksgiving was prompted by a good harvest. In later years, the tradition was continued by civil leaders such as Governor William Bradford, who planned a Thanksgiving celebration and fast in 1623. While initially the Plymouth colony did not have enough food to feed half of the 102 colonists, the Wampanoag Native Americans helped the Pilgrims by providing seeds and teaching them to fish. The practice of holding an annual harvest festival like this, however, did not become a regular affair in New England until the late 1660s.When I was growing up, my grandmother and aunt would drive up to where we lived in Sacramento from where they lived in Piedmont, beside the San Francisco Bay. My parents and grandmother would work to prepare and set the table for a grand feast. We were five children, so there would always be nine people around the table. The table was an old, oak table with huge clawed legs that could expand if you put several leaves in it. On Thanksgiving it was expanded to its fullest. There was a lip all the way around the table so that there was a surface of about four inches, and on the inside of that lip there was a ledge. That ledge saved us children many times. When our parents told us to finish our vegetables before we could have seconds on turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and cranberry sauce, we would just take the peas out of our mouths when nobody was looking and stash them under the table on that ledge. That’s where they stayed and dried over time, to make funny discoveries months later.No matter how hard pressed my parents must have been for money at that time, they always set a great table. Of course, my grandmother helped with that too. Together, they put a lace tablecloth on the oak table, and on top of that they placed candles and some kind of decoration, all the plates and silverware, and the crystal goblets. Real silver and real crystal. These were some of my mother’s prized possessions.My mother insisted on lighting the candles and turning out the lights. Then, my dad would come in with the turkey, and everyone would respond in some measure of excitement. Of course, he would also complain that he couldn’t see where to put the turkey on the table. And then he would complain that there was no room on the table with the decorations, so there would be a dash to remove the decorations and turn on the lights. It didn’t matter. We would have had our moment of ambiance. We would say grace, even before we really understood what we were doing it was part of the tradition. And then my father would cut the turkey and serve everyone. Of course we passed around bowls of mashed potatoes, gravy, yams, peas, olives, celery, cranberry sauce, and we would drink cranberry juice mixed with 7-up. For about an hour or so there were no problems. One might say that in our family when Thanksgiving rolled around we were most thankful THAT Thanksgiving had rolled around.Black Friday is something that developed over the course of several decades and, as almost everyone knows, it involves merchants offering discounts on items the day after Thanksgiving as a way of kicking off the Christmas holiday season. From a secular perspective it means several weeks of buying things so that people can give them to one another on Christmas. As a parent of young children, my wife and I used to value Black Friday, even though at first it wasn’t called that. We could get things at lower cost if we were willing to get up early and be in the malls and at the stores when they opened.Now, of course, this whole thing has gone over the top. Black Friday now extends over three days and on into Monday, with “Cyber Monday” being tacked onto it. It starts at Midnight, the morning after Thanksgiving. I still cannot imagine it. After working to prepare a feast, handling all the family stress, eating yourself full, THEN you are going to go join the lines of people waiting for the doors of some store to open at midnight?! That is just crazy! But people do it, and they do it in mass. Some lady pepper-sprayed a bunch of folks this year to get an advantage over them in the rush.The season of Thanksgiving crumbles in the onslaught of the season of getting. Black Friday is all about getting getting the best buy on a deal for some gadget, some toy, some THING. All the nice family and friendship values present on Thanksgiving Day vanish in the flames of greed.It makes me sad. Christmas when I was a child was about presents, of course, and the Christmas feast (which was like Thanksgiving, part two), but it was also full of family. There was no Black Friday then, and things seemed to be a bit more in balance. Even though my parents and us kids had yet to come to a knowledge of God through faith in Christ, we held to the Christmas story. We watched religious movies running on TV, and we thought about God’s gift of His Son. I always knew that Christmas was about Jesus being born. I always knew that Thanksgiving was about being grateful for what one has, because for us it was ultimately the provision of a loving God.Now, my grandmother and my aunt are both gone. My mother and my father are both gone. My youngest brother is gone. I am no longer with the mother of my children, and my children all live in different cities in the United States; we are all spread out from one another. What am I thankful for now? It’s the same. In the brevity of life, what matters is not what I can get on Black Friday, but the gift of grace, and my thankfulness for the people God has lovingly used to enrich my life.