If you don’t read the Allen Advocate, there are some things you may not know about Thanksgiving. But rest easy. I’m about to tell you about it. Thanksgiving is always on the 4th Thursday of November. If you wonder, the earliest it can come is the 22nd and the latest it can happen is the 28th of November. Fixing the blame for this particular date of celebrating this old traditional holiday lies on Abraham Lincoln back in 1863. However, back in the 1930s Congress changed it to the 5th Thursday in November. But, wait! In 1940 Franklin Roosevelt changed it back. Sort of like daylight savings time it didn’t please anyone. But I am OK with it.

But why Thursday? Back when this all started back in the 1600s Thursday was chosen as a compromise because the Catholics for sure couldn’t celebrate it on Fridays, a day of fasting. The Puritans, a big religious force in those long-ago days avoided doing anything that might please the Catholics and weren’t about to be praying on a Catholic holiday. For sure, nobody wanted a Saturday so Thursday it was.

Like many, Pat and I will be on the road on Thanksgiving Day. We will be tooling down the highway toward Dallas where we will enjoy the Thanksgiving feast with Tim and Lesli Costner at their daughter Emilee’s home. We’ll be joined there by her hubby Ryan McClain and his parents Rodney and Joy and various brothers and sisters and so forth that make up that family. I’m sure we will eat more than we need but isn’t that the way of Thanksgiving. Happy conversations and plenty of football games will give the big Holiday extra gravitas.

We will drive back to Allen the same day if plans materialize. I have to be back in time for Christmas which is just around the corner. In fact, I am informed that the First Baptist Church of Allen will continue its long tradition of its “Hanging of the Green” on Sunday, December the third. This is a great celebration which to me kicks off the Christmas Season here in Allen. This celebration is open to the public and I expect the usual good crowd to turn out for this time of music and special worship.

It will soon be a new year and what better way to start it off than to be in church. Shakespeare wrote the words: “To be or not to be.” Or to put it another way, “To live or not to live.” Our churches preach the theme of eternal life through Jesus through whose sacrifice on the cross gives us, mankind, an option to “be” forever. We are taught in the Bible that to be and to be so forever is a matter of personal selection.

Be sure and go to church this Sunday and check up on this “to be” idea of William Shakespeare. And while I love to hear from my readers, I hope I don’t get any enquiries about who this William Shakespeare guy is. And let me just say, “Happy Thanksgiving.”

Wayne Bullard, DPh cwaynebullard@gmail.com