 |
| My lovely grandma |
Monday is Thanksgiving in Canada, a day for being thankful for all the things that we have.
In today's culture being thankful is often overlooked. Ads on television and on the radio and in magazines focus on all the things that "everyone" still "doesn't have" or what they are lacking. "Get a big screen TV, because your neighbor has one", "drive a better car", "your house is too small", "last year phone model is outdated", "you must have the new game system to keep up with the Joneses" are some of the messages that everyone hears. It's hard to hear all those messages and still think that what you have is plenty good.
Of course all those messages are not really meant to make you unhappy, they are just meant to make you go out and buy more things, be it new shoes or vacation time-shares.
My grandma was born in Poland before WWII broke out. She, like many people in her generation, lived through really hard times. They lived through many hardships and often had to be more concerned with how to obtain the bare minimums needed for survival than having new TV or their house being too small. The benefit of that was that they learned to make do with what they had. If things got broken they didn't throw them out, they fixed it, If things got stained they were not replaced with brand new items but rather treated with stain remover and washed.
