Francophones call Thanksgiving Day "Le jour des actions de grace". Reflecting on that, one is reminded that it is a day that tends to get lost in a three-day holiday. Many keep Saturday and Sunday by various kinds of overindulgence that leave little time for stopping to think about the things for which we should be thankful. Thanksgiving Day itself is the time to recover and to return home from the long weekend.

In the French phrase, as in English properly understood, next Monday is a special day of 'actions' (activities, deeds) of 'grace' (thanks, gratitude). In English "grace before meals" is an action of giving thanks. In French the plural word 'actions' suggests that Thanksgiving should include more than one deed. Giving thanks over food is one. A donation to a food bank is another. Attending a service of worship on Monday morning when all churches should be open is another. And in a family each person sitting around the table might be asked to say for what he or she is particularly thankful on le jour des action de grace. Children would have to be prepared for that ahead of time.

Our Canadian Day of National Thanksgiving comes at a glorious time of the year. Apart from the solemnity of the multicoloured woodlands, the goldenrod that flourishes with Michaelmas daisies and the French-blue cornflowers in roadside ditches reminds me of the time we arrived for a year's stay in England. It was mid- September, the beginning of the season for harvest services in the churches there. We landed from R.M.S. Ivernia at Liverpool and, driving a Vauxhall Velox that awaited us at the landing stage, took ten days to arrive in Kent. They included two Sundays, one in Oxford and one in London. On each we sang harvest hymns in a church.

On our first Sunday in Canterbury we again, in song, ploughed the fields and scattered the good seed on the land and then gathered the produce into barns before winter storms began. The value of one National Thanksgiving Day became obvious to us.

Here in Canada the usual harvest decorations are wheat sheaves, Indian corn stalks and branches of red, green, orange, brown and yellow leaves. In Britain we were surprised to find, together with gladioli and "chrysanths", great bowls of goldenrod. Far from being the roadside weed that we thought it to be, it was recognised there as the delicate, graceful flower that it is. Some here accuse it of causing hay fever and other allergies but there are few things lovelier than a mass of tall goldenrod interspersed by bulrushes. Such a harvest time decoration is not, as they say, to be sneezed at.

Thanksgiving and harvest festivals have been observed at different times in various places. Last week's Jewish celebration of Sukkoth is one of them. As early as August the mediaeval Lammas (Loaf-Mass) Day featured the use of flour milled from the first of the year's ripe grain for the bread to be used at the altar. The English colonists in Massachusetts gave public thanks in 1621 for their initial harvest in the New World. In 1869 the new Canadian Parliament declared November 6 a Thanksgiving Day but by that time parts of the country were already shovelling snow and after 1919 the observance of Remembrance Day came less than a week later.

Finally, in 1957 an Act of Parliament proclaimed the second Monday in October, a day that was already widely celebrated, to be "a day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God". Fundamentalist atheists whose voices have become more strident in our multicultural society, as they insist on the right not to be expected to give thanks to any deity, object to such official theistic language. The more one reads the writings of the best-selling non-believers, the more one senses that their disbelief is not only in God but also in any real spiritual dimension in human nature.

Non-religious 'spirituality' seems to be chiefly concerned with self-help, the achievement of mind control and equanimity in a high-pressure world. Excerpt perhaps among Burmese monks it seems to be socially disconnected, aimed at withdrawal, peace of mind and good karma for the individual. The social justice requirements of the Hebrew prophets and of the Sermon on the Mount seem to be conspicuously absent.

But that opinion aside, we Canadians can be thankful that we still live in a relatively peaceful and tolerant land with a political independence that protects us from automatic involvement in the foreign adventuring and exploitation of the corporations that rule a neighbouring country and from the world-wide anger that they provoke.

Although our towns and cities reflect too often the breakdown of family life, the violence of gangs and the anti-social behaviour of individuals and although too many seem to have little concern about the acids that are eating away at our social equilibrium, this country is still basically an oasis of tolerance and of respect for differences. We should say "Thanks" for that.

This writer thinks that currently we should be thankful for the opportunity to take the next step forward in democratic government by experimenting with proportional representation in our provincial legislature. Our democracy does betray a democratic deficit. In a multi-party state arrogant political parties that snare the most legislative seats but that represent only a minority of the voters are not really representative.

Germany and New Zealand already have systems similar to the one proposed for Ontario. Surely many would agree that anything might be better than some of our past majority governments. Teachers, health care workers and civic councillors in particular remember the cuts and down-loadings of the Mike Harris 'revolution'.

What "actions de grace" are you planning for Thanksgiving? Fr Michael Waites of St Timothy Parish told a story about a man arriving at the proverbial Pearly Gates. Asked what he had done in the past year for anyone beyond his own family, he could remember only $3 worth of charitable donations. "That's not much. What should we do?", St Peter asked an archangel standing by. "I'd give him back his three bucks and tell him to go to hell" was the reply. 'Nuff said?