In this holiday season, MFR is grateful for the opportunity over the past year to work with its many valued clients and friends.  Our Principals are thankful for our Firm’s employees who are committed to serving our clients, service organizations, and the community.

As Thanksgiving approaches, we should begin to reflect on what has been bestowed on us and also on our most passionate hopes.  The origins of the holiday in the United States are familiar – new colonists thanking God for a safe journey to a new land and celebrating a modestly successful harvest. 

Today we see high unemployment, hunger, and homelessness in a land of plenty.  In 1930, President Hoover was facing the Great Depression. In his Thanksgiving Proclamation that year, he asked people “to remember that many are in need and suffering from causes beyond their control.”   A year later in his proclamation, he suggested “compassion over this winter that they too may have full cause to participate in this day of gratitude.” Thanksgiving is a time for individuals and institutions to commit to compassion and service. 

Several years later, President Roosevelt’s Thanksgiving proclamation called for steadfastness of purpose and a commitment to the vision of those who founded our Nation and “to keep pure the ideal of equality of opportunity and hold clear the goal of mutual help in time of prosperity as in time of adversity… May we be grateful for the passing of dark days (and) for the brighter day to which we can win through unselfish striving for the common bettering of mankind.”  Thanksgiving is a time to renew our vision for the future.

Our political system today faces many problems and challenges.  The President and the newly elected Congress are expected to agree on solutions and live up to the trust that we have placed in them.  We should remember that both Houses of the very first Congress recommended that George Washington issue a proclamation recommending a day of public thanksgiving to acknowledge, among other things, the opportunity “to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness…”  Thanksgiving is a time to remember all that is positive about our form of government and its potential.

There are serious political and economic divisions in our nation.  They are small in comparison to what President Lincoln faced in 1863 during the Civil War.  Declaring a national day of thanksgiving, Lincoln “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”   We should annually recommit to Lincoln’s prayer and strive for consensus.

Almost a hundred years later, President Kennedy’s proclamation summarized what the holiday is all about.  Although part of a legal document, his words can serve as part of an invocation for the holiday.

“It is fitting that we observe this year our own day of thanksgiving. It is fitting that we give our thanks for the safety of our land, for the fertility of our harvests, for the strength of our liberties, for the health of our people. We do so in no spirit of self-righteousness. We recognize that we are the beneficiaries of the toil and devotion of our fathers and that we can pass their legacy on to our children only by equal toil and equal devotion. We recognize too that we live in a world of peril and change--and in so uncertain a time we are all the more grateful for the indestructible gifts of hope and love, which sustain us in adversity and inspire us to labor unceasingly for a more perfect community within this nation and around the earth."

In this spirit, all of us at MFR wish you and your family a Happy Thanksgiving.

To hear more about Presidential Thanksgiving proclamations, visit the UH Moment page.