‘Thanksgiving, Ginger Rogers style is: Thanksgiving as an attitude, Thanksgiving as giving and sharing and mentoring. An attitude, a deliberate decision, not a “once in a life-time” event. Giving is possible when you know what you have been given already. This year we are celebrating the Ginger Rogers’ approach to thanksgiving, and it comes to you threefold: As a memoir (see below) from someone who was blessed by Ginger Rogers’ generosity and mentoring – as a short film in which you can see Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing in “Too hot to handle” from 1935. And in the form of a daily lift which will support everyone who is struggling with a sense of loneliness right now and who doesn’t have someone like Ginger Rogers as a mentor.
Thanksgiving is a holiday observed in the US. I think it should be a world holiday, a holiday in every country, and it should be re-defined to include truly everyone. One day of thanks for all. One day of global gratitude. My husband and I say to you all: Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, everywhere!
My first Thanksgiving
by Christina Sloan
I’ll never forget it. It occurred when I was in my teens, and it changed the course of my life.
Our family “home” in the south western United States was a battleground of alcoholism and violent verbal warfare, as well as psychological and sometimes physical abuse toward me, the only child. Thanksgivings were mere formalities. What was there to be grateful for in that mess? Christmases were waking nightmares. I was desperate and lonely.
The Sunday School I attended didn’t offer me any lifesaving message. So I began to frequent my classmates’ Sunday Schools in an urgent search for something better.
At 13, I began to take refuge in the make-believe world of theater, which I studied after school hours. This led to a job as an apprentice in summer stock theater in California, and it was there that I met the star of one of the shows, Ginger Rogers, the person who was to have the greatest impact on my life. Shortly afterward, I started my first year of college in New York, where Miss Rogers was playing on Broadway in Hello, Dolly.
When we’d met in California, she’d quickly sensed a troubled adolescent in need of a lot of help. And despite her Broadway schedule of eight performances a week, Miss Rogers took me under her wing. Twice a week, she gave up her rest time between shows to talk with me in her dressing room, And it was there, backstage at the St. James’s Theatre, that I heard for the first time of a God who is all good, and of Bible stories that relate in practical ways to people’s lives today.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Miss Rogers and her husband invited me to join them and some guests at their rented home on the Hudson River. When I arrived on Thanksgiving morning, she said, “Baby girl, you can either stay here and enjoy the quiet, or come with us to church.”
Not wanting to be ungracious, I chose the second option — and it transformed my life. Never before had I seen faces that glowed so warmly with peace and joy. I was used to mostly drunken, angry faces. Instantly I knew that what those people had found in that church, I wanted — I needed.
Although much of what I heard in that service sounded like a foreign language to me, one phrase really caught my attention — “the healing power of the divine Love.” Only some weeks later did I learn that the author, Mary Baker Eddy, was referring to her hopes for a “… happy day, when man shall recognize the Science of Christ and love his neighbor as himself, — when he shall realize God’s omnipotence and the healing power of the divine Love in what it has done and is doing for mankind” (Science and health with key to the Scriptures, p. 55).
“That’s the kind of healing I want,” I thought to myself. And, in time, that’s what I got. When we returned home after church, and before we all sat down to dinner, I pulled Miss Rogers aside to speak heart to heart with her. Relating what had happened to me at the church service, I said, “I’ve decided I want to become a Christian Scientist and learn about that divine Love that heals. I want to radiate the peace and joy I see in you and in that congregation.” She was overjoyed.
During Thanksgiving that year, I felt I had truly come home. For the first time in my life, I really gave thanks to the Lord for His mercy and His great goodness toward me. Study of the Bible and Science and Health soon helped me to find the happiness I thought I had been deprived of. As I began to discover the gentle presence of God’s Mother-love, the prophet Joel’s promise was fulfilled in my life. God did “great things” for me, restoring “the years that the locust [had] eaten” (Joel 2:21, 25).
In due course, I was lifted out of my family situation and learned to forgive those who had been involved. Ever since, my years have been measured from Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving.
