Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Buy Nothing Day 2016 November 24 2016
The Friday After Thanksgiving is celebrated at Waldorf Publications and the Research Institute for Waldorf Education, RIWE, as “Buy Nothing Day.” The sweetness of the Thanksgiving holiday is its absence of commercialism. Food, family, gratitude, gathering are all that need be pondered and enacted.
Spending a day, a moment, a joyful embracing of our friends, our families and the freedom we are blessed to have in North America, expresses best the spirit of our culture. Even the origins of this day of gratitude hold the best of our relations with the original people of this land, since the remembrance includes acknowledgement that without the generosity and compassion of the Native American people, the pilgrims in Massachusetts would surely have starved to death facing the winter there.
Living vividly into these pictures of life and love and gratitude are healing practices. One of the more powerful capacities we have as human beings is to lift our thoughts “above the fray” of daily living and imagine — imagine how lucky we are! Imagine how fine it is to spend time with those we love! Imagine how the future will hold good things while we are together!
In a fast-paced daily schedule, with fear lurking these days around many corners in our minds, and with a world of media telling us frequently and loud everything there is to worry about, everything that is wrong, we can resist succumbing to these driving thoughts, and pause instead to imagine something positive, something transformative, something beautiful and good. This could be, perhaps, one of the most effective tools we have for forging a future filled with these very things we cherish at Thanksgiving. These qualities of gratitude, of abundance, of appreciation, and the heart’s power of love we feel in their fullness at Thanksgiving, are the very things that will make a future that will support human beings best.
To honor this mood of Thanksgiving, and these qualities we most prize and that most endure, Waldorf Publications and RIWE are celebrating the fourth annual BUY NOTHING DAY on the day after Thanksgiving. Our intention is to balance “Black Friday,” with a light-filled Friday with gifts for all of you, our friends, to make something by hand, learn a song to sing with your family, try something out you have not tried before, and through these activities, to balance the frenzied larger world with slow, concentrated activity in an artistic vein with people we love.
It could very well be that you already have plans of a family sort for the Friday after Thanksgiving and if this is the case, we salute you. But we also thank you for reading and examining the gifts we bring with this blog! Sometimes even thinking about quieter things and what might be possible together in a less commercial stream of thought bear a healing force.
Happy Thanksgiving to you, your families, and your friends. And happy BUY NOTHING FRIDAY! We are glad you are with us in imagining a beautiful world full of constructive joy, peace, and love that creates an even more beautiful world than this magnificent one we already enjoy and inhabit together.
Buy Nothing Day 2016 PDF download of 3 crafts, 1 recipe, two songs, and a short story!