Jessai Flores

At every Cramer Thanksgiving dinner, we go around the table and say what we’re thankful for. The answers have ranged from health and family to LeBron James coming home to Cleveland — shoutout Grandma Marge. 

It’s not a unique tradition, but it feels as if it’s taken on added meaning in recent years. As my cousins, brothers and I have left home for college, we’ve found greater appreciation for the support from each other and our parents

But why is gratitude a once-a-year exercise? With so much to be grateful for, why do we only express it on the fourth Thursday of November?

I’ve tried, over the past two-and-a-half years, to break into the habit of continued gratitude. It began with a recommendation from a high school tennis coach.

On March 10, 2020, we were finishing our final practice before spring break. As we wrapped up, our coach huddled us up and gave some long-winded speech. I forget most of what he said, but the main idea was this: we had to shift our mindset during the season’s most important points. For us to appreciate those moments more, he asked us to keep gratitude journals to start a practice of appreciation for the small moments.

The next day, I selected a small Moleskine notebook to use as my journal. In the morning, I wrote down three things I was looking forward to that day. And that night, I wrote down three things I was grateful for. 

That week, spring break of 2020, also happened to be the start of COVID-19 shutdowns. I never went into school again that year. The tennis season was canceled within a few days. We never discussed gratitude journals again.

That journal did not achieve the desired results of making me a bona fide tennis superstar. But it became much more important than that. 

As the world around me seemed to be crumbling and I suddenly felt very isolated from my friends, it forced me every morning to find those three things every morning and every night.

It made me appreciate big things I had taken for granted like my health and family. That was perhaps an obvious outcome. But it also forced me to find small things to be grateful for: pasta and meatballs, beating my brother in video games, my dad reading the word of the day on Urban Dictionary at family dinner, FaceTime calls with my friends and private Zoom chats.

It’s been two and a half years now, and I haven’t missed an entry. What I once thought of as a somewhat cheesy exercise has become one of my most cherished rituals and changed the way I think about my days. 

When I face scary days — like catching up on the homework that somehow piled up over Thanksgiving on the Sunday before classes resume — there are still always three reasons for optimism. And at the end of the most difficult, exhausting and frustrating days, I’m forced to remember that it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

There is always something to be grateful for. 

So if I’m so perfectly grateful all the time, why do I still care so much about the Thanksgiving tradition? It should be just another day.

But Thanksgiving captures something so central to the idea of gratitude that I seem to ignore: sharing. 

It’s one thing to write down that I enjoyed a meal with a friend. It’s another to send a text saying, “I’m thankful to have you in my life.” I can be grateful to be home, but it’s not the same as telling my parents how happy I am to see them.

I find it challenging to express gratitude unprompted. It feels awkward. But there are so many people that mean so much to me, and it feels so deeply wrong to only acknowledge that once every 365 days. Let’s normalize Thanksgiving.

ANDREW CRAMER
Andrew Cramer is a former sports editor, women's basketball beat reporter, and WKND personal columnist at the YDN. He still writes for the WKND and Sports sections. He is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College and is majoring in Ethics, Politics & Economics.