We should be thankful that there aren’t Thanksgiving carols, for all the obvious reasons.
We should be thankful that we can express thankfulness outwardly, or inwardly. Everybody should be doing this daily, just as a matter of course—it makes a bigger difference than you realize.
We should be thankful for extra quilts, flavored sleep aids, shadowy dreams shot through with strobe-lit bursts of recognition that quickly fade from memory.
We should be thankful, but not too thankful, because a lot of people don’t have much to be thankful for, except us, if we can take some time out from being thankful to be generous on a local community level.
We should be thankful those distant sirens aren’t coming for us.
We should be thankful that it is possible to say we are blessed without actually saying “blessed,” a conscious or unconscious humble-brag that has been overexposed in social media lately. As it happens, I have a couple dead-tree thesauruses at hand—thanks, Dad!—so I can confirm that, instead of declaring yourself blessed, you might instead assert that you are, in fact, “regarded with particular reverence or respect,” “throned on highest bliss,” or “#holy”. Hey—thank me later.
We should be thankful that our elders are around to be baffled and gently amused by our complicated electronic toys.
We should be thankful that none of us absolutely have to post something different that we’re thankful for on Facebook every day in November, every November, out of some weird peer-pressure obligation.
We should be thankful that someone, somewhere misses us, worries about us. If you’re all “fuck, no one cares about me,” well, I care about you, whoever you are.