Thanksgiving Slice of Life

On Wednesday morning, my mom asked me what we should have for party favors at Thanksgiving. I shrugged. It didn't really matter, we just had family and close friends coming. Anything little would do, I thought. But my mom had other plans. She took me to a gift store, and we looked in tins for a while to choose little tokens to give out. I thought it was a good idea, each of the tokens had a quote or picture engraved into the metal, but I didn't really see the significance until later that day. We were back home, and I had put the tokens in to cute little gift bags, and labeled each bag with a name-- 16 bags for our 16 guests coming the next day. My mom tapped me on the shoulder, and I looked over at her, and the computer screen. She was on a site called coloradogives.org. We scrolled through the many charity options, while mom described the plan. For each person, we would make a donation to a charity that they would care about. Now suddenly the simple gift bags had a real thanksgiving purpose. When we had our thanksgiving dinner everyone opened the gift bags, and we explained to them what we had done. Everyone was smiling, thanking us, and having a good time. Giving the money to all of the charities really seemed to give the whole concept of thanksgiving a deeper purpose.