Meaning of Thanksgiving gets lost in holidays

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

- Somerset Maugham

It's beginning to seem like Thanksgiving has become a holiday afterthought, lost between the orange and black decorations of Halloween and the red and green of Christmas.

Even the fact that it's become a four- or five-day holiday from work or school hasn't made much impact. The time set aside to focus on family has become a time set aside to focus on shopping.

Maybe it's because it's a holiday universally symbolized by a turkey.

Or maybe it's just at the wrong time. As with most cultures, Thanksgiving evolved from a harvest festival at the end of another successful farming season. But most of us don't really think about harvests anymore.

Maybe it would make more sense to move Thanksgiving to the week after Christmas. That's when the year's efforts could be put in perspective. That's when the holiday's gift-giving could be acknowledged.

And that's when we'd have something important to think about between Dec. 25 and Jan. 1.

I'm not sure what to do about the turkey.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: For every complicated problem there is a simple, easy to understand, wrong answer.

TODAY'S JOKE: Which leads us to today's joke.

It seems there was an engineer, an office supervisor and computer technician driving down a steep mountain road.

The brakes failed and the car careened down the road out of control.

Halfway down, the driver managed to stop the car by running it against the embankment, narrowly avoiding going over a cliff. They all got out, shaken by their escape from death, but otherwise unharmed.

"Well," said the office manager, "to fix this problem we need to organize a committee, have meetings and, through a process of continuous improvement, develop a solution."

"No," the engineer said, "that would take too long, and besides that method never worked before. I have my trusty pen knife here and will take apart the brake system, isolate the problem and correct it."

"I think you're both wrong!" the computer technician said. "I think we should all push the car back up the hill and see if it happens again."