Making Room at Thanksgiving

One thing is certain, as I prepare to pull out the special tableware and plan the perfect menu: Thanksgiving is nothing without a gathering. 

I guess I should say that more carefully - I’m sensitive toward those that might feel lonely this holiday season - I get that too. This is my second Thanksgiving as an adult orphan, and I feel a little lost with still newly empty seats at the table. Can Thanksgiving carry forward with empty seats?! 

My feels say maybe not. Maybe I cannot do Thanksgiving this year. Maybe it’s not worth mustering for. Maybe it's not worth the menu planning and the table setting and the making room. 

Ah, making room… my heart skips a beat and I catch my breath: 

I know how to make room. 

For I have been made room for. 

Not once, not twice, but hundreds of times. 

Hundreds of times this community has made room for me: it has welcomed me - into its homes, into its churches, into its places of business, into its schools (my kids right now, at ages 7, 9, and 12 are welcomed so well into their schools)....over and over and over again, seats have been pulled up to make room for me. 

Life hasn’t played out the way I thought it would, but there is still so much good. 

I have been made room for. 

By friends. By family. By this community. By Jesus - who welcomes every bit of my jagged edges and my genius. 

I have been made room for, so I know how to make room. 

And it doesn’t look like the perfect menu, it doesn’t look like the tablescapes I’ve so thoughtfully curated from Pinterest…. No, scrap those things. I can set those aside. 

I have newly empty seats, and although my heart is still hurting, there is room to reclaim: to reclaim space for others … to welcome them in, to join my life with theirs (if only for a season), to share in the welcome and abundance and expansiveness of this community. 

So I’ll say it again: Thanksgiving is nothing without a gathering. 

Indigenous, settlers, new friends and old… we make space as the season turns. No, things aren’t always as we thought they would be, but when we stick to gathering, when we stick to the table, when we stick to making room and pulling up new seats… I have to believe that good (and maybe even better) is still ahead. We forge the future of our community around our dinner tables and one extra chair at a time we make room for what we had never imagined and we open our arms to different and to possibility and to what could be. 

So, friendsgiving, Thanksgiving, a football game & snacks, an outdoor picnic by the lake… whatever your fancy or your tradition (I’m a firm practitioner of scruffy hospitality & frozen pizzas myself)... pull up some extra chairs this holiday, call a gathering, and prepare to make room. The best might still be yet ahead.

[As shared in the Chautauqua Gazette, November 25, 2024]