I was recently asked to review a book that talked about listing
prayers & scriptures by the letters of the alphabet. The purpose was for
memorization. They talked about the Hebrew Acrostic Tradition. An example if
you’ve never heard of this: The Hebrew
alphabet has 22 letters, and Psalm 111 has 22 lines in the Hebrew text, and
each of them begins with the next successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Now, while I didn’t care for the book I read & reviewed, the best
thing about it was the resource section in the back which gave me a list of
books to add to my TBR list. Plus, it gave other ideas for listing things by
the alphabet, one was an exercise to come up with 26 things you are thankful
for.
I thought this a good idea this year for the week of
Thanksgiving. I’ve had an issue with the holiday since I took a class in
college called Minority Literature where we did a study on Native American Lit.
I get a little too riled up about the blatant lies in the history books now,
and the more I learned over the years, the more I found I had trouble celebrating
this holiday. As I continued to study, I learned more about Thanksgiving as a
National Day of Mourning – Read here if you are interested in more information
on this: http://www.uaine.org/dom.htm
Thankfully, what I’ve gotten from my research was the idea of alternative ways
to celebrate, which has become a theme for me in recent years in all of my
holidays.
I wish I could remember where it was that I read this,
but one native American Indian mentioned (and I’m paraphrasing from my poor
memory) being thankful on Thanksgiving for hope, something that could not be
taken away from anyone, the hope of better things to come. I liked the idea. In
fact I bought a box the other day with the word “HOPE” on it and I placed it in
the center of my fall decorations. I also like the idea of being grateful, all
times of the year, each and every day. As one who battles depression, I’ve found meditating on what I'm thankful for can help when all my medicines and other preventative
tools fail me some days.
So, with all those angles explained, you can see why I decided
this year to try my hand at the Thanksgiving Alphabet Exercise or Challenge.
Some letters are easy, and I couldn’t decide on just one, for others, I
struggled to find anything at all simply because there are not as many words
that start with say U, X or Z. So, you have to get creative or use a site like http://www.scrabblefinder.com/
And so, I challenge you to sit down, take some me-time, with pen
and paper, and try to come up with your own Thanksgiving Alphabet. Putting mine
below just by way of example, but I think you could sum it up by being thankful
for family and my writing along with a few other things *winks*
Thanksgiving Alphabet 2014 - Kiki Howell
Amazon Top 100 Best Sellers, Hidden Salem and What Lies Within
Us
Books
Compassion & Candles & Creativity
Dreams
Emotions
Family & Food that Nourishes My Body
Giving Hearts
Home & Health & Happiness & Holidays
Ideas
Jonah
Kisses
Love
Marriage & Meditation
Netflix
Open-Minded People
Paranormal Creatures
Quinn Family & Heritage
Reading & Reviews
Solomon, Steve & Spirituality
TV & Time Spent with Family or Friends
Unity - Finding Regardless of Differences
Vacations
Water & Writing & Winter
X-tra Special Moments
Yoga & Youthful Feelings
Zeal & Zoom Feature that keeps me from wearing reading
glasses at times
No comments:
Post a Comment