No, this piece is not about a new Hallmark movie featuring a big-city executive who moves back home and dumps her rich city boyfriend for the local veterinarian she shunned in high school.
Related: Beautiful Message from President Trump and the First Lady on Christmas
It could be, though.
It’s actually how I feel about the season — and about more than that.
I know Thanksgiving is supposed to be the gratitude holiday.
But as a bachelor with grown kids, I usually spend that holiday alone.
However, on Christmas Eve, we all get together for a day in Philadelphia.
It’s only one of a few days a year I get to spend time with my kids as a group.
Philly is really magical at Christmas and strolling and shopping on Walnut Street, having a cigar with a son or two at Holt’s, or going to Parc on Rittenhouse Square for their perfect hot chocolate is really a treat. It certainly was on Tuesday.
So, for this, I’m really grateful.
But in the larger sense — and I think we sometimes forget the rarity of it — I am grateful to live in the time and place that I do. (Shown at the top of this article: first lady Melania Trump at the White House this Christmas season.)
Related: Thankful for Our Country and All Who Created It
Yes, there are lots of issues in America today and the battle lines are drawn in several areas.
However, just to live here in 2019 is a blessing unto itself.
Our free-market democracy is not the norm in the world, even today.
And if we factor history into it, America and the West — not to mention other places like India and Japan — are the exception rather than the rule.
In most of humanity’s experience with government, there’s been been one brutal despot after another, usually. When despots weren’t brutal, they were corrupt and oblivious.
When they weren’t any of those, they were generally short-lived.
Yet in the late 18th century, and before that to a point in Great Britain, selfless geniuses won a war, then got together in Philadelphia to build a free nation.
It wasn’t easy — and their legacy is still under siege today by various forces that see them only by their mortal status, skin color, and gender.
Nevertheless, those dead white males, imperfect as they were, gave us one of the greatest, yet sublime, gifts of this holiday or any holiday.
We open that rare and precious gift every time we speak our minds, go to our church, or cast a ballot.
And it’s not relegated to once a year.
So I am thankful for this, for America, this Christmas season and as we approach a New Year.
It’s the canvas that my affection for my family, my friends, and my country is drawn upon — not to mention my God.
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