Sunday before Thanksgiving. Themes can include gratitude to God, gratitude for loved ones, gathering the family together, breaking bread together, Native American perspective on the holiday, Puritans, remembering those less fortunate.
From Tapestry of Faith Curricula
Unitarian Universalist Perspectives
Guest at Your Table
Guest at Your Table is an annual tradition in which congregation members take home a box featuring people that the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) has worked with recently. These people are your 'guests,' and you are asked to share your blessings with them each meal by putting your spare change in the box. As you give to your guests, you can learn about them by reading the Stories of Hope booklet. UUSC uses the funds raised through this program to support their human-rights work in the United States and around the world!
Most congregations begin their Guest at Your Table celebration on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, but please check your congregational calendar for your opening date.
Some congregations celebrate bread communion at this service. This ritual can include the breaking and passing around of bread throughout the congregation. Congregants eat the bread, or feed it to one another, while being led in a reflection about gratitude, sharing and being together in community.
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Something new could come out of this moment of discomfort; something like healing. This is our opportunity to reimagine what Thanksgiving could be — and who we could be.Reflection | By Daniel Gregoire | November 21, 2018 | From Braver/WiserTagged as: America, Anti-Oppression, Direct Experience, History, Indigenous American, Responsibility, Thanksgiving -
In 1617, a few years before English settlers landed, an epidemic began to spread through the area that became southern New England. It likely came from British fishermen, who had been fishing off the coast for decades. By 1620, ninety to ninety-six percent of the population had died. It decimated...Reading | By Myke Johnson | November 4, 2018 | From WorshipWebTagged as: America, Anti-Oppression, History, Indigenous American, Race/Ethnicity, Thanksgiving -
Every October and November in the United States, we find ourselves in a season of false and misleading stories about European settlers and Native Americans. First there’s the story that Columbus discovered America in 1492. Then there’s the story about the Pilgrims and the Indians at the first...Reading | By Myke Johnson | November 4, 2018 | From WorshipWebTagged as: America, Anti-Oppression, History, Indigenous American, Race/Ethnicity, Thanksgiving -
“There’s a hunger beyond food that’s expressed in food, and that’s why feeding is always a kind of miracle. It speaks to a bigger desire.” Note: one version of this quote, quasi-attributed, appears in Take This Bread (p. 23) by Sara Miles.Quote | By William E. Swing | June 1, 2018 | From WorshipWebTagged as: 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Abundance, Body, Communion (Christian), Direct Experience, Food, Food Justice, Generosity, Hospitality, Humanism, Searching, Secular, Stewardship, Table Grace, Thanksgiving -
An adequate Christmas would have you calm and open, taking it in, accepting whatever is. Slow it all down like you might be, in some way, attuned to the pace of the Eternal. If you need, you can fake it at first.Reflection | By Jake Morrill | November 29, 2017 | From Braver/WiserTagged as: 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Advent, Balance, Challenge, Choice, Christmas Eve / Christmas, Courage, Direct Experience, Family, God, Self-Care, Spiritual Practice, Spirituality, Thanksgiving, Winter Solstice / Yule -
May we give thanks always, believing that, even in the world’s bleakest moments, the dance of life is always underway.Reflection | By Maureen Killoran | November 23, 2016 | From Braver/WiserTagged as: Balance, Despair, Earth-Centered, Hope, Nature, Thanksgiving -
We gather at Thanksgiving, in some sense, to retell the creation myth of our country. In this myth is our very best and our very worst: a boldness; a care for the common good; a wish to say we before I. Yet from even before the first Thanksgiving feast, it’s a story of theft and violence, and a...Reading | By David Schwartz | November 15, 2016 | From WorshipWebTagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 2nd Principle (Justice, Equity, & Compassion), 6th Principle (World Community), America, Anti-Oppression, Freedom, Generations, History, Humanism, Indigenous American, Race/Ethnicity, Secular, Thanksgiving -
Let’s start with the people we love and those who love us, thankful they are in our lives obliging us to open our hearts. Let open hearts embrace the Earth, the sea and soil and stars, blessed by bold beauty, the bounty of being. Then with hearts open to beauty let us embrace the arts and the...Poetry | By Swiftwalker | October 19, 2016 | From WorshipWebTagged as: Abundance, Beauty, Earth, Earth-Centered, Grace, Gratitude, Humanism, Relationships, Thanksgiving, Unitarian Universalism, Wisdom -
I heard the Second Brandenburg Concerto played in honor of Bach’s 300th birthday, and I was swept away. I remembered a story about the people who send messages into outer space. Someone suggested sending a piece by Bach. The reply was “But that would be bragging.” Some say we get what we...Reading | By Robert Walsh | November 18, 2015 | From WorshipWebTagged as: Arts & Music, Awe, Beauty, Direct Experience, Gratitude, Humility, Thanksgiving, Wonder, Worth -
I [do not] mean to present myself as some kind of bodhisattva of compassion. However, in my better moments—at least in my more conscious moments—while I’m eating, I do try to imagine the lives and even the deaths of the creatures who nourish me. I try to think of the freedom and exhilaration...Reading | By Lillian Nye | January 21, 2015 | From WorshipWebTagged as: 7th Principle (Interconnected Web), Activism, Animals, Body, Earth Day, Ethics, Food, Food Justice, Nature, Thanksgiving, Unitarian Universalism, Work