With the exception of the usual suspects on the hard left, most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving Day.  Like Independence Day, Thanksgiving is a quintessential American holiday.

Thanksgiving Day is a golden opportunity for celebrants to accomplish a couple of things.

First, we should bear in mind that in the absence of a lively religious sensibility, the notion of a national day of thanks couldn’t so much as have been imagined, let alone put into practice.  Atheists and agnostics may wish to deny this.  Reason, to say nothing of history, refuses to accommodate them: It’s something other than lunacy to thank someone for having given us our lives only if we believe that there really is someone who gave us our lives.  

Now, the belief in God may be mistaken.  The point, though, is that in a nation of atheists, a day reserved for expressing gratitude for our very existence and all that we have would never have even been a thought.

Remembering this, we remember both that ours was a nation founded by Christians, and that this belief in a loving God has given rise to a number of practices—like Thanksgiving—to which we attach much value.

Secondly, Thanksgiving is an occasion to foster a character excellence that, in this age of endless government entitlements and the glamorization of victimhood that they entail, has to be among the rarest of virtues: gratitude. 

Americans, with their almost singular focus on rights, are always in danger of forgetting that it is their obligations that, first and foremost, make them the moral beings that they are.  Human beings, unlike animals, have duties.  A duty is a debt owed to others.

On Thanksgiving, we should call to mind the debt of gratitude that we owe to others, and the eternal debt of gratitude that we owe to the Being who is the Source of all goodness.

Happy Thanksgiving!