PD Editorial: In gratitude for the resilience of this ‘chosen place’

Thanksgiving is a holiday steeped in traditions - family, feasts, maybe a football game and, most meaningfully, pausing to count our blessings.

The ritual dates to the 17th century, when some of the earliest European settlers in North America celebrated their first successful harvest.

Yet it seems that Thanksgiving Day has often fallen in the bleakest of times.

President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation establishing a national day of Thanksgiving came at the height of our nation’s bloodiest war. Sixty-six years later, Thanksgiving came a month after the stock market crash that thrust the nation into the Great Depression.

In 1963, Americans sat down to Thanksgiving dinner still reeling from the assassination six days earlier of President John F. Kennedy, and, nine years ago, we were only beginning to grasp the magnitude of a worldwide economic meltdown.

Even in the darkest days, people found reasons for gratitude.

This year is no different. Our nation is as divided politically as it has been in a long time, and we experienced destructive hurricanes and shocking mass murders this fall.

Here in Sonoma County, we gather in the aftermath of a cataclysmic firestorm that killed 43 people in Northern California, reduced entire neighborhoods to ashes and left thousands of our neighbors newly homeless.

The October wildfires also destroyed homes, and altered lives, in Mendocino, Lake and Napa counties - a truly regional disaster with ripple effects that will last for years.

As families and friends sit down today for a holiday meal, many of us will be praying for the victims and the survivors.

Despite the turmoil, we see many reasons to be thankful.

First among them is the strength and generosity of our community, which was demonstrated as never before when disaster struck and will be needed for years to come.

When the fires erupted, neighbors helped one another. In the days that followed, evacuation centers were overwhelmed with donations of cash, food and clothing. Hundreds of people, including some of the victims themselves, volunteered to serve meals, distribute relief supplies and, fulfilling a truly human need, to sit with displaced individuals and listen.

Before long, vacant stores were becoming relief centers, neighborhoods began organizing to facilitate rebuilding efforts, a communitywide “garage sale” offered people faced with starting over a chance to replace some of their lost possessions for free and at least one local restaurant is hosting a Thanksgiving meal for fire victims.

As of Wednesday, more than $22.5 million had been donated to the North Bay Fire Relief Fund, which, among other things, has provided $500 gift cards for each child who lost a home and aided 92 first responders who lost homes while fighting the fires. (You can donate at https://www.redwoodcu.org/northbayfirerelief)

These extraordinary efforts complemented annual Thanksgiving events, including Wednesday’s feast at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, sponsored by the Redwood Empire Gospel Mission, and another today at the Sonoma Community Center.

Luther Burbank was describing the harvest when he called our area “the chosen place of all the earth,” but he just as easily could have been describing the people of Sonoma County.

Happy Thanksgiving.