Grateful for my parents and their 50 years of marriage



This Thanksgiving, I'm giving thanks to God for the gift of my parents and their upcoming 50th wedding anniversary.

Be not alarmed. All things considered, my Boomer parents, Richard and Karen, are in remarkably good health. That my family is not cherishing this holiday season in fear that it may be the last for one or both of them is itself a blessing.

We weren't always so lucky.

Just a few days before Thanksgiving in my senior year of high school, my father nearly died when an aortic aneurysm that had been silently ballooning in his chest suddenly ruptured. Only by the grace of God did he survive. So many others who have his condition, including late actor Alan Thicke, do not.

After that catastrophic event, my entire family underwent a thorough medical assessment, at which point doctors discovered a severe congenital heart defect in my mother, then in her early 40s. Over the next two decades or so, her health slowly deteriorated until she received a heart transplant three years ago. Had she not qualified for a transplant, she might not be here today.

I am not trying to be morbid this holiday season or to fixate unnecessarily on death. But I know that I am likely to outlive my parents, and when they're gone, Thanksgiving and Christmas will never be the same.

The older I get, the more I witness the heartbreak of other people my age losing their parents. In November 2021, my best friend from high school lost her mother to a rare and aggressive form of ALS. Six months later, my friend's father was gone too, less than a year after he and his wife celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

Another friend, two years younger than I, is still reeling from the unexpected death of his mother in the summer of 2023. Yet another friend is savoring whatever time remains with his mother, who was recently diagnosed with cancer.

And I would be remiss if I did not remember the death of my beloved Aunt Linda in May 2021 and the loss of my husband's uncle a few weeks ago.

Though memento mori is a good mindset to adopt at any time of the year, I am not trying to be morbid this holiday season or to fixate unnecessarily on death. But I know that I am likely to outlive my parents, and when they're gone, Thanksgiving and Christmas will never be the same.

I know no parents are perfect, but I am extraordinarily fortunate to have the parents I have. My mother, a skilled designer, taught me about the importance of beauty and acting like a lady. My dad instilled in me a love of sports, and his quick wit reminded my siblings and me never to take ourselves too seriously.

But even more important than those lessons, my parents gave me the gift of my Catholic faith and taught me through words and actions the importance of the sacrament of marriage.

To this day, I would be devastated if my parents divorced, and I cannot imagine the pain and trauma endured by children of divorced parents. That every day my parents wake up and choose each other is a blessing worth recalling this Thanksgiving.

This spring, the two of them will celebrate 50 years of marriage.

My in-laws are also still married, as are the parents of my two sisters-in-law and my brother-in-law. These couples are not impervious to marital strife. At various times, some of them have overcome addiction, financial hardship, estrangement from other family members, and, of course, devastating illness. Commitment is a choice.

My brother and his lovely wife, the mother of my darling nieces and nephews, now have 20 years of marriage under their belt too. So it seems that while divorce can be a generational curse, marital commitment can be passed down through the generations as well.

God willing, my husband and I will someday celebrate 50 years together. If we do, we will have God and our parents and their respective examples of marriage and commitment to thank.

I don't know why God has thus far spared my parents, Richard and Karen, and continues to allow them to live full and relatively healthy lives, but I'm grateful that He has. However many Thanksgivings we have left together, I'm especially thankful this year for them and their faithful commitment to one another — in sickness and in health.

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Thankful: How learning a new skill creates bread — and patience



In an attempt to become a useful person, I told myself at the beginning of 2024 that I would teach myself a new skill every week. This lasted about two inconsistent months. I made butter, learned how to knit and cross-stitch, and even learned to cut my own hair.

None of these stuck these skills stuck like making sourdough, the hobby I became the most thankful for.

Although making sourdough is not the most challenging cooking task I've attempted, it forces me to work on other underdeveloped skills, most notably patience.

My roommate first shared her sourdough starter with me, and I taught myself to make bread through video tutorials online. I'm thankful that it is a simple, inexpensive, yet incredibly rewarding hobby that I get to share with my friends and my family.

When it comes to anything kitchen-related, I'm pretty much self-taught (in a bad way). Like many people in my generation, I can cook simple things and follow recipes, but it's not a skill I grew up developing or being particularly good at.

Making bread was not on my bingo card, so to speak, especially after the time I accidentally added salt instead of sugar to a batch of cookies I attempted in college. But I learned, and I'm thankful I did.

I'm thankful that I don't have to go to the store and buy an $8 loaf of bread made with ingredients I can't pronounce. I'm also thankful that I'm able to give my friends loaves of bread so that they too can avoid buying the $8 loaf from the store with the unpronounceable ingredients.

I'm thankful that my dad asked me to make him a loaf of bread for his birthday instead of the much more intimidating task of baking a cake.

Although making sourdough is not the most challenging cooking task I've attempted, it forces me to work on other underdeveloped skills, most notably patience. The most difficult part about the bread-making process is called the bulk ferment, which is roughly a 12-hour period in which the dough proofs. If you bake the bread too early, the bottom becomes concave and the texture of the crumb is dense and gummy. Neither quality is desirable for a good loaf, yet they are ones I encountered multiple times.

I'm not a particularly patient person. It's easy for me to point the finger at social media for rotting my attention span — and my brain, for that matter — but I've never been a particularly patient person. The phrase "good things come to those who wait" has been the antithesis of my life.

But there was no getting around it with bread-making. There were no shortcuts. Believe me, many attempts were made.

So now when I give a friend a loaf of bread, I'm able to do so knowing I made it with patience and care and that it would taste pretty darn good. For that, I'm thankful.

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I'm thankful for the reality of good and evil



Christ is King.

Satan is real.

In a strange way, I'm thankful for both. It's not that I'm happy about the principalities and powers with which we do battle in this fallen world, of course. But I thank God for the wisdom to seem them for what they are.

'Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.'

Satan is real.

It's a sentence I would have been embarrassed to speak just a few years ago. Perhaps you're familiar with that famous bell curve meme? At one end you have the simpleton, at the other the genius. The joke is that both extremes believe the simple, unadorned truth: In this case, Satan is real.

In the middle we find the educated modern — or midwit. Not for him a crude, three-word fact. Sentences and sentences of hemming and hawing, qualifications and hedges, intellectural frippery. That's where I was for most of my life. That's the sweet spot for the American elite and those who aspire to it.

That worldview worked, until it didn't. The first step to acquiring wisdom was realizing I wasn't nearly as smart as I thought I was.

The cover of the the Louvin Brothers' 1959 country gospel album "Satan is Real" regularly shows up on those clickbait lists of weird album covers. It's the kind of goofy kitsch I used to love with an affectionate sense of superiority.

It strikes me a little different now.

The brothers didn't hire a professional to design the cover of "Satan is Real," and it shows. The image — featuring a 12-foot plywood devil Ira Louvin built himself, backlit by burning, kerosene-soaked tires — has been widely shared for its kitsch appeal. And yet the eerie power and urgency of songs like the title track or “The Drunkard's Doom” can make you wonder if maybe they're right.

The Louvin Brothers' homemade hell can't compete with the far more immersive depictions of the demonic offered on today's screens. And yet few of these visions spring from genuine conviction.

We don't take evil seriously, especially not supernatural evil. But we're like the obnoxious preteen who's only recently outgrown Halloween, walking through the haunted house and gleefully pointing out how “fake” everything is. Just who is he trying to convince?

I remember how easy it was for me to dismiss the notion of supernatural evil.

The occult isn’t what it used to be. We’d need the firewood from a thousand Burning Mans to dispatch every witch casting spells on TikTok, but their “magick” tends to focus on self-realization and wellness, like yoga for people with purple hair and face piercings.

Child sacrifice in the form of abortion persists, but many of its practitioners are only dimly aware of the death cult they serve. Even the pants-soilingly grueling ayahuasca trips now in vogue don’t seem to pose any eternal risk; all spirits encountered are assumed to have our best interests at heart.

Current popular entertainment tends to reflect this shallow and naïve understanding of the unseen world. Rare is the artist who dares remind us of what might really be stake in these lives we lead.

This is why the sickening dread evoked by Irish director Liam Gavin's 2016 movie "A Dark Song" is so unfamiliar.

Two people meet in a remote farmhouse in rural Wales: a desperate, grieving mother, and the bitter, alcoholic occultist she’s hired to help her contact her recently murdered young son. They begin an arduous, months-long ritual, which writer-director Liam Gavin depicts with painstaking realism.

By showing how tedious and grubby the path to damnation can be, "A Dark Song" makes us ponder our own demons and the disturbing possibility that we’re not as in control of them as we’d like to think. Someday we may reach out to remove the mask, only to find that our deepest childhood instincts about what lurks in the dark were right all along.

“Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience,” says Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. I'm grateful every day for a new chance at cultivating this wisdom — and I wish the same for you.

Happy Thanksgiving.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for the wisdom of Thomas Sowell



Among the most influential thinkers who has helped shape and craft conservatism for decades is the great economist Dr. Thomas Sowell.

There are few people who have done as much to combat the destructive policies of the progressives and the left through logic and reasoning as Thomas Sowell. His books are essential reading for anyone who desires to seriously study the best arguments against liberalism.

Among those are "Basic Economics," which is pretty self-explanatory; "A Conflict of Visions," about the failed leftist vision for America; and "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," which tackles the liberal view on race relations.

One of the most important contributions Sowell has given us is an economic maxim that slices through one of our worst intellectual tendencies.

Sowell's dictum

He often refers to this idea in the brief but powerful dictum: "There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs."

This simple statement has incredible wisdom behind it. So much of our current politics is mired in Manichean exaggerations where partisans pretend that the solutions to all our problems are very simple and it's only through the evil of the other side that we are kept from a glorious utopia. You can see this tendency being manipulated by people on both sides of the aisle.

On the other hand, Sowell's maxim sets out that that every policy solution will have some drawbacks or trade-offs. This means that many, though not all, of our political problems are about finding the best option among many rather than a simplistic binary between an extreme evil and Pollyannish messianism.

Managing trade-offs is not as exciting as declaring every political battle the equivalent of the apocalypse, but that is what politics should be — less about emotional outbursts and more about statesmanship and pragmatic leadership.

For this and so many other reasons, I am thankful that God has blessed this nation and the world with the wisdom of Thomas Sowell. If you are unfamiliar with his works, I highly encourage you to seek them out.

Here's a great interview with the great Thomas Sowell:

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'I am thankful for the freedom of self': Women express gratitude for their abortions in piece posted on Thanksgiving



In a piece posted by The Nation on Thanksgiving, several women indicated that they were thankful they had abortions.

"I am grateful to have accessed my abortions in Texas while it was still legal in the state, and that my multiple abortion experiences now guide my work," Nikiya Natale wrote in the piece. "But I am thankful for both of my abortions. I am thankful that I didn't want to be a parent then, so I didn’t have to be a parent then. The blessing to plan a pregnancy and have a child when I wanted to have a child is something I have immense gratitude for. I really am thankful for it, particularly in this political climate and moment."

Natale is the deputy director of the pro-choice organization We Testify, according to the group's website.

Savannah Williams, who is listed on organization's website as the operations coordinator, celebrated that terminating pregnancies had allowed her to complete college and start a business free from the worries of providing for and caring for kids.

"When I think about how far I've come and the things I've been able to do—such as finishing college and starting my small business—I am grateful that I was able to do them without having to worry about making ends meet and struggling to care for two small children whom I wasn't ready for. I am thankful for the freedom of self. Some people may call this selfish, but I don't think it is. I am able to care for myself and live free from anxiety and parts of my life that I have needed to leave behind. I have deep gratitude that I was able to make a decision that was good for me," Williams noted.

Kenya Martin, who is listed as program manager on the We Testify website, indicated that she is "thankful ... for each abortion" she has had.

"In 2015, I sat in my local abortion clinic filling out my paperwork. This wasn't my first abortion, but things took a turn for the worst when I suddenly became very sick and had difficulty formulating a sentence. I was experiencing an ectopic pregnancy; I was bleeding internally because of a ruptured fallopian tube and needed emergency surgery," Martin noted.

"An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus," according to the Mayo Clinic. "An ectopic pregnancy can't proceed normally. The fertilized egg can't survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding, if left untreated."

Burger King employee received a crummy goodie bag for working 27 years without missing a day, then David Spade stepped up big time



A Burger King employee has worked at the fast-food restaurant for 27 years and never missed a day. In recognition of his hard work, the management company rewarded the worker with a lousy goodie bag. However, comedian David Spade stepped up to give the hard worker a much more suitable gift.

Kevin Ford, 54, works as a cook and cashier at the Burger King in the Las Vegas McCarran International Airport in Nevada. Ford was given a gift bag by HMS Host – a company that operates restaurants in airports.

For working 27 years without missing a single day, the company rewarded Ford with a single movie ticket, a Starbucks cup, two packs of Lifesavers candy, a bag of Reese's Pieces, two pens, and other trinkets.

Despite the severely lackluster gifts, Ford was very appreciative of the gesture.

A video of Ford accepting the crummy goodie bag went viral this week. Many viewers remarked on how grateful Ford was while accepting the uninspiring gifts.

@thekeep777

He's Worked for the Company for Almost 3 Decades and Has Never Called Out!!!😵‍💫🥺😱😭 #Grateful #Dads #FathersDay #Loyalty #Honor #WorkersUnite #Rewards #Thankful #NorrinRadd777 #theKeep777

Ford's daughter noticed that people were interested in giving her father a more rewarding gift for his hard work, so she launched a GoFundMe campaign.

"Hi, My name is Seryna. The man in that video is my father. He has worked at his job for 27 years and yes, he has never missed a day of work," Seryna Ford wrote on the crowdfunding website.

"He originally began working at this job as a single father when he gained custody of me and my older sister 27 years ago," she explained. "Then as our family grew and he remarried, he continue to work here because of the amazing health insurance That was provided through this employer because it was unionized. Which got all four of his daughters through high school and college with full healthcare coverage."

The daughter noted that they are not expecting any money, but said that her father would love to visit his grandchildren in Texas.

The GoFundMe campaign caught the eyes of many – including David Spade.

Spade made a donation of $5,000 to Ford after hearing his story. However, Ford was not sure if it was the real David Spade. Then Ford received a message on Instagram, according to TMZ.

"Keep up the good work. 27 years," Spade wrote to Ford.

Ford was blown away that the Hollywood celebrity contacted him, "HOLY S**T Dude!!! Cannot Believe This!!!"

The Burger King employee exclaimed, "THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! For Even Watching the Video! I Love You My Brother!!! Much Love and God Bless. ... I think [I] might be able to take a day off."

Spade replied, "Wait till year 30."

Ford joked, "Damn, are you one of my managers???"

Burger King issued a statement regarding the viral video, "The Burger King brand and its many franchisees nationwide are committed to recognizing and celebrating the achievements of the thousands of people serving across a wide range of roles — all dedicated to providing our guests a world-class experience."

"Following review with this location's franchisee, we've learned that this video depicts a Team Member in receipt of a peer-to-peer reward in recognition of a short-term positive performance/experience," Burger King told People magazine. "The franchisee offers its Team Members a robust employee recognition program, which includes the recognition of tenure milestones and monetary awards."

In an interview with YouTube personality Sierra Nicole, the gracious Ford thanked everyone for the support.

"I just want to say thanks to everybody out there. It's just so overwhelming," Ford said. "I'm just Kevin, you know. I just love everybody. I think that it probably touched people because I think we as humans, period, just need love and gratitude. And when you see someone like that, you know, ... I was happy to get anything. Some people got nothing, so I was just happy to get anything."

At the time of publication, the GoFundMe campaign had raised more than $63,000. He told TMZ that he may use the money to buy a new hybrid vehicle so that he can visit his daughters and grandchildren in Texas.