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backlit sunflowers in the spirit of thanksgiving

Welcome & Introduction

Thanksgiving is genuinely my favorite holiday. I love preparing for a home full of hungry guests! But in years past, I've often felt a bit of a disconnect when preparing for Thanksgiving celebrations. When expending so much effort cooking, cleaning, and prepping at this time of year, it's easy forget that the true meaning of Thanksgiving is.. well, to be thankful!

So this year, before jumping into the holiday season, I wanted to set aside November as a season of thanksgiving.

In pursuit of this goal, I tried a new thing. I asked The Storied Recipe community one simple question: What are you thankful for?

I learned it can be hard to express a grateful heart in our cynical culture - but ultimately, the response was beautiful and overwhelming. So many took the time to express gratitude for both the simple things and some of the BIG good things that happened in the past year.

The best part is that with each expression of gratitude shared by my community, the more grateful I become.

I'm so excited to share this episode with you today. I genuinely hope that your experience is the same and you finish listening with peace, joy, and thankfulness overflowing in your hearts - so Thanksgiving can be a season beyond Thanksgiving dinner.

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Transcript of The Gratitude Episode

Introduction from Becky Hadeed, host of The Storied Recipe

Hi there listeners. Happy Thanksgiving and welcome to the gratitude episode where we are celebrating Thanksgiving first and foremost by being thankful. So this episode is a little unusual for the storied recipe, but it is not totally without precedent. This is a crowdsourced episode, and the idea is simply to replicate that tradition, that great time, that many of us observe on Thanksgiving Day, where we gather with friends and family around the table to name our blessings. And to celebrate with each other, the joys come. The things that people have overcome each year and we just take a moment to cultivate gratitude for a lot of the little things. But in this episode you don't have to wait to eat. It is OK if you cheat a little and you grab just something tasty to eat or some hot something hot to drink right now. So you can just sit back and savor. Savor these little these little tidbits from our listeners. Or of course, you might be busy packing and. Cooking and that is OK too, so there's nothing fancy about this episode. All I did is I just took each person contribution exactly as they left it. And I strung them together in a little row with just some music underneath, and so it's not a fancy episode, but I think that's the thing about gratitude. The more we focus on it, the more we do find satisfaction in the simplest of things. So thank you. Thank you everyone who contributed. Thank you. To you who are listening, you have all taught me a lot this Thanksgiving season. Here we go. And yes, I did not let myself off the hook. My 92nd contribution is right in the middle there. Enjoy my friends.

Lopa

Hi Becky. I cannot believe that I saw your newsletter right now and the timing could not be perfect because I am just strolling around walking my son in the stroller and I entered the park that I usually come to and just two days back. It was full of fall colors and today the leaves have all gone. The trees are bare and I just said to myself that I'm so thankful. I'm so grateful that I I actually got to see all the colors throughout the two weeks because I almost went out every day every other day with my son and we had a beautiful fall and I had missed this long fall season for a while because we were away in the North Canada where the fall can be really short season. And its my favorite season so I'm just so thankful for this beautiful bounty of beautiful colors that I got to see, uh, this year. And in general, I'm very thankful that wherever we have lived, even when we were in Whitehorse, we were blessed with so much beauty of nature. And while the world was tucked away during pandemic we were still able to go outside and I can never never take that for granted.

Martha

I am grateful for family and friends. I am grateful to have lived long enough to be a Gigi, a grandmother to three grandchildren. One little girl and two teenage boys. They expand my knowledge and perspectives in life and bring me great joy. I am grateful for friends who are so supportive in good times and bad. And finally, I am grateful for having witnessed and experienced my oldest sister, Nancy's last year of life. I learned so much watching how she handled the end of her life. She had lived for 14 years with stage four cancer. And she. But she lived, she kayaked. She hiked, she knit. She was involved in her church. She took dance. She taught dance. She competed and danced with her husband. And as my physician said, she spent her time living instead of spending her time trying not to die.

Regina

My name is Regina Range and the three things that I am thankful for are favor in my second year of my business, the smell of food that I prepare, and encouragement from the new community that I have surrounded my food business.

Danielle

I'm thankful for living in a place that is not at war. I'm thankful for being able t...