:: Happy Thanksgiving ::

Im doing good. We got 6 new people on my one year mark.  Me and my three companions are going to a members house for dinner and have a ugly sweater party. It should be way fun. We just went shopping for them today. I dont know if we are doing anything else that day. I'm thankful for you keeping me safe when I was really young. I'm thankful for this Gospel and for the opportunity to go to the Temple. I'm thankful for the sunshine and living in washington made me so much more grateful for that. I love that story of the five grains of corn. I also love the story which is like it of the martin handcart company. Where they almost starved to death and yet they still kept walking to the promised land. Have a happy Thanksgiving!  Stay happy and grateful!


Five Grains of Corn

Some early new Englanders had an interesting Thanksgiving Day Custom by which they kept their minds in contact with gratitude. At their Thanksgiving dinners they placed five grains of corn by every plate as a voluntary reminder of those stern, harsh days of winter when the food supply of the Pilgrims had become so depleted that only five grains of corn were rationed at one time to any individual.

The early Pilgrims wanted their children to remember the sacrifice and hardship necessary to make possible the settlement of a free people in a free land. They wanted to keep alive the memory of that long sixty-three day trip taken in the tiny Mayflower. They desired to keep in their hearts the picture of that “stern, rockbound, New England coast” and the inhospitable greeting it extended to its first post-Columbus settlers. The Pilgrims wanted to remember that first terrible winter which took such a toll of lives. They did not want their descendants to forget that on the day in which their ration was reduced to five grains of corn, only seven healthy colonists remained to nurse the sick. And nearly half their total number lay in a windswept graveyard on the hill. They also wanted to remember that when the Mayflower sailed back to England in the spring, only sailors were aboard.

The display of five grains of corn at each Thanksgiving Day plate was a fitting reminder to keep their heroic past fresh in their memories. The corn served as an appropriate symbol to help the Pilgrim forefathers keep their gratitude to God alive and vital. Suppose that at this particular time we should borrow the Pilgrims’s Thanksgiving Day symbol, what would five grains of corn at our plates signify to our minds?