By Thea Jarvis

Thanksgiving may well be the last bastion of traditional American holiday-making.

Despite efforts by merchants and advertisers to overshadow the feast with Halloween finery and Christmas muzak, Thanksgiving remains, essentially, a choice the American people make to pause, give thanks, and turn to one another in friendship and good will.

It is as if, having watched the decline of other Christian holidays and holydays to the extent that commercial promotion has taken precedence over customary values, people are struggling to protect the Thanksgiving ritual from being torn to pieces by insensitive or offensive over-marketing.

Witness the numbers of people to be found at ecumenical Thanksgiving services raising voices of praise to a mutually acknowledged Creator. Or the flock of folks who will appear – uncoerced – at Mass on Thanksgiving morning.

Granted, someone had to rise early and get the turkey in the oven, and some rebel moans might emerge from sleepers who had hoped to lie abed for a few more delicious minutes. But generally, the whole family is on hand to pray together because they want to be.

This notion of “protecting” the feast of Thanksgiving has taken hold around the Archdiocese of Atlanta no less than in other parts of the country – perhaps more so.

At. St. Joseph’s Church in Athens, parish families are invited to share their holiday meal with a single Catholic whose family may not be close by. Students from the University of Georgia are particular targets for the outreach, since many campus residents cannot make it home for Thanksgiving and getting together with a warm and welcoming family is the next best thing to mom’s home cooking.

Other parishes, working through local St. Vincent de Paul conferences provide full Thanksgiving dinners to individual families who would otherwise go without the traditional turkey and trimmings.

Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Atlanta solicits parish families who would take on the task of providing a Thanksgiving meal as a personal commitment. The children of Holy Cross Church in Chamblee donate canned goods through their school of religion to be used by parish Vincentians who deliver them to needy families along with turkey and fresh fruit.

Some churches forego the traditional model of a private Thanksgiving feast for a community celebration, which nourishes others with fellowship as well as food.

St. Anthony’s Church in Atlanta’s West End, long an innovator in the area of urban outreach, serves a delicious Thanksgiving dinner to friends in their community who would either go without or have no one with whom to share the feast. Families and individuals from St. Anthony’s and around the archdiocese come to donate, cook and serve the food, and, as a bonus, receive an outpouring of friendship and thanksgiving themselves.

Patterning themselves on St. Anthony’s successful effort, the St. Vincent de Paul conferences of Catholic churches in Cobb County have planned since last spring for a Thanksgiving feast that will accommodate the elderly, the needy, and the lonely in their community.

Holy Family, St. Ann’s, Transfiguration, and St. Thomas the Apostle churches have pooled their resources with donations from parishioners and will feed an expected crowd of 400 on Thanksgiving Day. Each church is responsible for a particular part of the menu – meat, vegetables, desserts, stuffing, paper goods, etc. Students from St. Joseph’s School in Marietta are donating their own hand-crafted table decorations.

Vans and buses will fan out to pick up the guests and bring them to St. Thomas, where the meal will be served by volunteers from all parishes.

And in Alpharetta, where “less work for mothers” is the song to sing, the parish family is again feasting together on the big day. Because north Georgia hosts so many geographical transplants and nuclear families so often have to go it alone, the parish last year began a tradition of gathering as an extended family to celebrate the feast.

Newborns and nursing home residents, toddlers and teens, young adults and middle-agers meet on Thanksgiving to share the meal. Participants are asked to bring only one dish to complement the dinner and the parish bills it not only as a good time to get together as a community, but an even better opportunity to give the chief cook and bottle washer a break from the kitchen duty.

St. Paul the Apostle Church in Cleveland will also host a parish Thanksgiving meal, a potluck dinner that begins late in the day. The church provides the turkey and parishioners bring vegetables, salads and desserts to share.

Although the latest bit of historical scholarship contends that the feast of thanks originated thousands of years ago with primitive Mediterranean peoples whose harvest rituals venerated a grain goddess, Americans still think of it as their very own and special holiday.

As such, it has taken on the near-status of a holyday among those who deem it fitting to set aside a time for saying, in effect, “thank you, Lord.”

Because it is unencumbered by church doctrines and interdenominational sparring, the feast of Thanksgiving is, therefore, a time to celebrate with other congregations who simply want to give thanks.

Ecumenical thanksgiving services – happily – abound. St. Philip Benizi Church in Jonesboro has been joining with area churches for several years to participate in a pre-holiday Thanksgiving service that includes Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Seventh Day Adventists and Baptists, as well as Catholics. All are members of an inter-faith council, which works together throughout the year.

Another inter-faith group in northeast Atlanta, which counts Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists and Catholics from Holy Cross in its ecumenical cluster, continues its custom of a Thanksgiving eve service held each year at a member church. Like the Jonesboro group, the cluster works together at other times of the year on community projects. The Thanksgiving celebration is a natural outgrowth of their interdenominational fellowship.

The National Catholic Rural Life Conference has set aside the days up to and including Thanksgiving, November 20-24 as a time to pray and meditate on the values inspired and nourished by a rural lifestyle. These include trust, mutual aid and generosity, public spirit, self-sacrifice and simplicity.

In protecting our feast of Thanksgiving, polishing and fine-tuning it to reflect the deep interior gratitude we wish to express, these rural values emerge – in large cities and little towns, in small parishes and overflowing ones, in families who have little to share and those who have much to give.

It is as much a harvest of the heart as a harvest of the land that we celebrate this Thanksgiving.