Thanksgiving and Christmas are so beautiful - my favorite time of the year. Not only do I love the celebrations but I love the rich spiritual and theological dimensions that attend them.

That we have a holiday to recall gifts, generosity, and gratitude - a day that spiritually "fits" with many traditions, including religious and secular ones - is lovely.

Less than 20 countries have a day set aside for Thanksgiving. And we're one of them!

Gratitude is such an important spiritual practice, a fundamental human practice really. It is truly something we share no matter how or if we believe in God.

And for Christians, it is an often unnoticed but important theological theme across the entire New Testament.

Christmas is, of course, distinctively Christian. At its core is the idea of God-with-Us, that the man Jesus embodied the fullness of God in human history.

That story fills me with wonder, awe, a kind of wordless attentiveness that stops me in my tracks.

For these reasons, Christmas overflows into the world. One needn't be a Christian to understand that it is a story about the presence of God in the world, about longing & peace, the dream we humans share for a renewed cosmos. About light overcoming darkness, about love birthed.

Thanksgiving's gratitude opens hearts to expect such gifts, to anticipate Christmas's possibilities of joy, beauty, and glory.

I hope you'll go deep into the spirit of both this year. While many familiar customs and traditions will be absent, the call of gratefulness and sacred presence await. In the more intimate settings of home and table, thanks still attends us and peace still calls.

To me, this is the most profoundly spiritual time of the year. I hope you will find it so. These weeks needn't be about what we've lost, but perhaps, they can be about what we find.

Welcome thanks.

See wonder.