As Thanksgiving approaches this week, I find much to be thankful for. Thankful is a fine word, but I have to add grateful as another appropriate adjective for this season.

“Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse.” —Henry Van Dyke

As I’ve thought my way through it, I have realized that Thanksgiving is my favorite day of the year. It’s probably been that way for most of my adult life, as it seemed it was an easier holiday to capture most of the family and friends around one table and simply enjoy each other’s company.

Conversely, Christmas in America today can be full of unrealistic expectations and commercialism no doubt fostered to a degree by both the perfect lives depicted on Hallmark and other Christmas specials as well as corporate America’s desire to simply sell more stuff.

Add to that the time or travel demands on many throughout the day trying to be all things to all people and it’s little wonder that many find Christmas a bit stressful and for some even a bit disingenuous.

As I matured from childhood, the allure sort of faded away, although I was blessed by many wonderful memories of Christmas from the 1960s as well as fleeting vignettes in subsequent years. So I come back to Thanksgiving in part due to the fact that it occurs during the peak of the hunting season for most of America. This has afforded me many opportunities over years and across the length and breadth of this country to spend a portion of the day with friends and treasured hunting dogs pursuing what we love.

I was privileged to spend several Thanksgivings with my adopted family in South Dakota along with lifelong friends Randy and his wife Beverly joining us at least twice. After a wonderful meal with the entire extended family present, we were able to stretch our legs in the harvested corn fields following my then young Gordon Setter “Caena,” whose legs were as strong as Osage bows and whose curiosity and heart were even stronger. The day was spectacularly beautiful and mild for South Dakota in late November, with cornflower blue skies and the visage of a graceful animal in her prime doing what she loved the best.

The great literary poet Ralph Waldo Emerson always believed in the importance of nature and the individual and held firm that God was revealed through nature, penning, “Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful for beauty is God’s handwriting.”

Those power words are near and dear to my heart, as I know they are also to my lifelong friend Mark Alexander.

I am thankful for those memories and friends.

After losing both my parents and three grandparents before reaching 20 years of age, I really started leaning on friends and extended family during holidays and simply have too many to thank over the years for including me in their family celebrations. I am thankful for them and the kindness shown.

Last week, quite unexpectedly, my wife and I lost our eight-year-old Gordon Setter, “Grace,” to an undiagnosed tumor that caused her sudden death. We had spent a perfect fall morning hunting with her on the prairie just outside of our favorite small town in North Dakota and then with shocking suddenness, “Grace” was no more. I am sad that I won’t watch her artfully and strategically work my wife for turkey scraps as we clean up this Thursday after the meal, or watch her graceful work in the field, but I am more thankful that I had the eight years with her.

Upon hearing of her passing, the outpouring from the International Sporting Dog Community and friends was heartfelt and overwhelming with offers of condolences as well as news of upcoming litters of puppies to fill the void. Messages poured in from literally all over the world. Sometimes just knowing that others acknowledge and understand a particular event is reason enough to be thankful.

After a sleepless night mourning her loss, a pre-dawn conversation with her breeder in North Carolina left absolute assurance that the void will be filled with another beautiful Gordon Setter that will bring their love, beauty, grace and talent to our lives yet again. As our conversation was concluding, a beautiful crimson sunrise full of promise was blooming in the eastern sky.

I am thankful for all of that and the entire close knit family that is the sporting dog world.

When our Founders penned the words in the Preamble to the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…” the operative words were “more perfect.”

Not “perfect.”

Scholars have interpreted this language as referring to the shift to the Constitution from the somewhat imperfect Articles of Confederation adopted by the Continental Congress on November 15, 1777. Make no mistake, however — in penning the Preamble to the Constitution, the Founders were under no illusion of man or government being “perfect ”

The Federalist Papers were a guide to writing the Constitution and indeed in Federalist No. 51 James Madison wrote: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

There are far too many in America today that condemn our great Nation for any number of imagined or real sins, but who never stop to count the real blessings we have.

Family, friends, jobs, and endless opportunities, and the beauty that we find in life, food on the table and if you add your health, you are truly blessed by any measure. These are the blessings of American Liberty!

Please, this Thanksgiving, stop and really ponder the true blessings you have been afforded in life, and consider how to extend those blessings to others.

May Peace, Thankfulness, and Gratitude abide with you.