The Simple Question That Will Make Your Thanksgiving Dinner a Success
I Was a Grump About Gratitude Until We Started Playing This Game at Thanksgiving
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Every Friday on The Nonlinear Life we talk about life as we live it today. We explore the urgent and emotional issues at the nexus of family, health, work, and meaning. We call it This Life.
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Thanksgiving is the national holiday of my family. When my mother met my future mother-in-law more than two decades ago, before they even sat down, they retreated to another room and came back with an agreement: The Feilers would get Thanksgiving, the Rottenbergs would get Passover.
I love everything about Thanksgiving—the food, the weather, the robust conversation. Everything, that is, except the giving thanks.
Yup, I’m a grump about gratitude. Yes, yes, I know. We’ve been told for years that it’s the superpower of happiness. Cicero said, “Gratitude is not only a virtue but the parent of all others.” The only person who doesn’t seem to like gratitude is—checks notes—Stalin. Oops. He said, “Gratitude is an illness suffered only by dogs.”
The origin of the Gratitude Movement (capital G! capital M!) goes back to the early years of this century. Martin Seligman, the former president of the American Psychological Association who founded the field of positive psychology in the late 1990s and has gone on to publish more than 350 scholarly publications and more than 50 books, tested various interventions on 411 people. Here’s what he found:
When their week's assignment was to write and personally deliver a letter of gratitude to someone who had never been properly thanked for his or her kindness, participants immediately exhibited a huge increase in happiness scores. This impact was greater than that from any other intervention, with benefits lasting for a month.
Robert Emmons of the University of California, Davis, the founding editor-in-chief of The Journal of Positive Psychology, did a study in which he assigned participants one of three tasks. One group was told to feel gratitude, another to feel irritable. A third group was asked to keep a short journal of five things that happened over the previous for which they felt grateful. Participants wrote things like “waking up this morning,” “the generosity of friends,” “God for giving me determination,” and “The Rolling Stones.”
“I was surprised at how dramatically positive our results were,” he wrote.
At the end of the 10 weeks, participants who’d kept a gratitude journal felt better about their lives as a whole and were more optimistic about the future than participants in either of the other two conditions. To put it into numbers, according to the scale we used to calculate well-being, they were a full 25 percent happier than the other participants.
Jo-Ann Tsang, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Baylor University, explored the prosocial nature of gratitude and found that people felt more gratitude and were kinder to others when they believed they had received a favor compared to those who believed their good fortune was the result of chance.
Fine, fine. The evidence is strong. Oprah kept a gratitude journal for a decade. People I love have written books on gratitude. I even blurbed a beautiful one. A friend has started a cool new company called 7 Thank Yous that allows you to write letters of appreciation to people from all parts of your life. Since you’re not grumpy like me, you should check it out!
In a comprehensive study of gratitude literature published in The Wiley Handbook of Positive Psychology, four distinguished scholars, including Emmons, showed that gratitude does three things: 1) it protects from stress, 2) it improves sleep, and 3) it increases well-being.
I want all those!
But—and here’s a big but—that same review showed that there is a dark side to gratitude. Abuse victims can feel gratitude toward their abusers, which allows them to remain in a bad relationship longer than is healthy for them. Citizens in times of war who express gratitude for their situation show increased support for military action. The same is true for people who live in societies that discriminate against others. Showing gratitude may perpetuate situations that harm other people.
At a minimum, I’m hopeful that more studies will look critically at the emotion that everyone embraces.
But that brings us back to Thanksgiving. Perhaps now you understand why I rolled my eyes when my sister insisted that we play a simple game at Thanksgiving dinner about a decade ago. Everyone had to go around the table and say what they were grateful for. Oh, please. Here come the butterflies and platitudes, I thought. The premise was so simple—and obvious—that surely the game wouldn’t work.
Except it did. The children stepped up. The parents lit up. The grandparents teared up. To be sure, some answers were cliché or pandering. “Oh, you love being together as a family, do you? Then why are you texting your friends under the table.”
But in general, since the obvious answers get snatched up quickly, people have to think about what they want to say. If anything, learning to play up to adults and learning to sit through a conversation that takes longer than a TikTok is a useful life skill for teenagers, especially, to learn
This year’s game will have a sad note. Every year for the last decade, I’ve said that I’m grateful for “full attendance,” meaning that everyone in my extended family has been present at the meal. This year, we won’t have that. My dad died last month, so I’ll have to come up with a new answer.
But I will. Maybe I’ll even say that I’m grateful that we get to play this game—or and that I get to share it will all of you.
If you end up trying it, please don’t thank me. You’ll just add yet another reason for me to give up my grumpiness. I’m grateful for your privacy in my season of need.
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You might enjoy reading these posts:
12 Foolproof Table Topics for Any Thanksgiving Gathering
‘Why Is a Cranberry Called a Cranberry?’ And Other Thanksgiving Questions Answered
Or these books: Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and Council of Dads.
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