Good day, Thomas Jefferson Hour podcast listeners. Thanks so much for taking the time to listen to these conversations.

I enjoyed this week's conversation so much. Gotta say quickly, thanks to those of you who support the show.

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Yes, and happy Thanksgiving to all of you. I remember so many thanks-givings from my childhood and from my adulthood.

I don't remember that many Christmases, but I remember lots of thanks-givings. And for me, thanks-giving is turkey, potatoes, stuffing,

two types of green beans, cranberry sauce, and not out of the can, cranberry, real cranberry sauce, and two types of pumpkin pie, my traditional pumpkin pie and my mother, my late mother had discovered something called chiffon pumpkin pie, and it is a superior pie that's in a graham cracker crust.

And so every year, this year, I'll be alone. I'm not trying to wine, but I will have a small turkey, and I will have all those things because it is the moment of moments in American life where we realize we are the most blessed people on the planet.

We've abused that blessing to a considerable extent, but we are the most blessed people, and abundance is the very center of American life.

We mustn't forget those who do not share that abundance even in this country, and I always remind whoever is at my table of our privilege, but I love Thanksgiving.

I absolutely love it, and I thought we could do a program this week, David, to talk a little bit about that, and it kind of moved in some directions I didn't expect, but that's all right.

That's the nature of the Jefferson hour, and you brought up the history of Thanksgiving, and of course you can't talk about the history of Thanksgiving without

Jefferson's own and a weirdness about this that he wouldn't declare a national Thanksgiving holiday because he felt that it violated the wall of separation between church and state just seems crazy to me, but that's Jefferson.

It's consistent at least with his government philosophies and principles, but you don't want to look too closely at the first Thanksgiving because it might hurt your digestion.

That's good. During the show, you told a short interesting story about a water heater going on.

I water heater.

The takeaway from that is that sometimes having those things taken away from you is a good thing. It makes you recognize.

The generations now are blessed with so many technological advancements. A lot of us take that stuff for granted, and when it's removed even for a day or two, you kind of have to step back and think about that, and that's a good thing.

When there's a power outage, we think about these things when something goes wrong with the water has done in Flint, Michigan, and also in Jackson, Mississippi, people realize that we take for granted that when you open the tap, there will be clean and healthy water that when you flip the switch for the lights in your bedroom that the lights will go on when you walk out to the car that it will work and that there's a gasoline service station.

Somewhere nearby where you can refill it, and we assume that our houses will be heated. We make so many assumptions. These are the blessings of America.

But when you go to any other country, any other country, you're reminded of the artificiality of that paradigm, a good deal.

And so it's important to travel to see that. They remind us of the things we enjoy, and also the things that we take for granted. And so when my water heater went out, I realized what an amazing thing it is that a fire starts every day and keeps water hot on demand.

Anytime I wish to use it, this didn't happen till the 20th century.

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