Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!!

We are so grateful for so many things. The gluttony was executed at our good friends, Dave & Kim White. Charles was saying "Mac & Nora" the whole way over. That's how much time we spend with them! ha ha.
Caleb & Clay were with there mom this year...but I got to spend it with BOTH the babies I was involved in pro-creating.

After our traditional prayer, which is a reading of a proclamation written by Abraham Lincoln: text to follow... I've been lax in my duties of emailing it out to most of the people I know in the hopes of it catching on...




Tomas...the life of the party! ha ha.




The traditional reading of Abe's proclamation...I still choke up SOMEwhere every year...

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S

THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION OF

1863

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war (in 2001 &2 we inserted "the TwinTowers")which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

We have been the recipients of the choisest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness or our hearts, that all these blessing were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands (since 2001 we've inserted..."such as our soldiers stationed in the Middle East") , to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father Who dwelleth in the heavens.

(signed) A. Lincoln

October 3, 1863