CLEVELAND, Ohio - Thanksgiving really isn't a tryptophanatic's feast day or a football junkie's day-long fix. It's the best holiday of the year at our house.
I say that in the face of a Christmas season that begins before Halloween and lasts until Ralphie pummels Scut Farkus in the last showing of the "A Christmas Story" marathon.
The painting
Instead of Coca-Cola ads showing Santa as a red-faced symbol of incipient cardiac infarction, my favorite holiday picture is the one Norman Rockwell painted for the Saturday Evening Post magazine at Thanksgiving 1942 during World War II.
Although the most prominent feature in it was an improbably large turkey that apparently escaped from the Macy's parade in vain, it was no ode to gluttony. It depicted home and family, the familiar memories that sustained warriors and made battle in faraway lands and on hostile shores worth it.
The day's purpose
We surely miscast Thanksgiving by building it around the NFL games. How thankful are we supposed to be for the Detroit Lions' intrusion into the living room every Thanksgiving afternoon, anyway?
The ideal we try to observe at our house is in the message on a sign my wife Marilyn placed in the kitchen long ago: "Gratitude turns what we have into enough."
This is a tough sell in sports, where winning is supposed to be the only thing.
How can enough be defeat? Not when fans hold up foam rubber hands with a "We're No. 1" finger aimed skyward, like a player who just scored a touchdown pointing upward to thank Touchdown Jesus where he really lives and not at Notre Dame.
No one who does his best is ever diminished by the numbers on a scoreboard that becomes a blank slate by the next day.
Games come and go. As the philosopher George "Sparky" Anderson said, "Every 24 hours the world turns over on someone who was sitting on top of it."
Character stays.
How much is enough?
Sparky's life was baseball, and that was enough for him even without the World Series rings.
I was a newspaperman for 47 years in three cities in three different areas of the country, the last 34 years here. It was like that for me.
I loved it (and how many get to say that about a job?) and still do as a part-timer, deadlines and all. Maybe deadlines especially.
There was an energy in the rattle of typewriter keys and later in the clacking of laptops in a press box after a big night game that could make catching lightning in a bottle seem like a candle in the wind.
There was only one championship in four Cavaliers' trips to the Finals in LeBron James' second tour with the team. But does that mean watching, in the worst case, the second-best player ever, was meaningless?
Were three Indians' World Series appearances in a quarter century nothing?
Was it pointless watching Omar Vizquel light up the baseball diamond like, to paraphrase a LeBron simile, a Vegas showroom?
Was it empty seeing angry Albert Belle smash almost every mistake pitch he saw?
The blessing
What's more, we share these moments with our kids, just as we pass along the green bean or sweet potato casserole at the table on Thanksgiving Day.
In the same way, we sportswriters tried to put readers there with us, in the arena, amid the tumult.
I call it all a blessing, and I'm thankful for it.