Stories of Gratitude For The Thanksgiving Season
A good book is always the best dessert following a delicious meal with family and friends during this holiday season, a time to curl up on the couch and escape into the literary world. This month, I share my five favorite books that remind me of this special season. Enjoy!
Although published in 1995, I still return to this lovely collection of daily anecdotes about living a life of real abundance, not the kind to be found in material goods. Ban Breathnach captures the essence of authenticity through gratitude of all the gifts we already have in
our life.
For writer and poet Wendell Berry, life is really all about membership. We’re not talking Rotary Club here, however. Berry quietly and elegantly weaves the importance of community in a fictional story about a family living in Kentucky. It’s a quiet novel that leaves you emotionally full and reflective, just be sure to have a tissue box nearby.
Okay, you must have a new cookbook for Thanksgiving and the latest one by Savannah chef Paula Deen is my favorite. She’s included a terrific variety of menus for all occasions that can easily be used for the big November meal. I can just hear Paula talking through each menu in her thick Southern voice encouraging me to pick up the spatula and get busy!
Children need a new book for the season, too, and this is one to please. Mistress Pig invites her friends over for a dinner party, yet, like most dinner parties, there’s a cooking disaster in the kitchen and her friends rally together to save the day.
How better to acknowledge the nuances of celebration than through the lyrical beauty of poetry? Current U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall studies the beauty of routine in our days through his wonderful verses. CD of his reading included.
