Of the four major holidays of the American “Holiday Season,” Thanksgiving probably comes in fourth. Christmas is the monster, of course, dwarfing every competitor throughout the year. Sugar-driven Halloween is an understandable favorite with kids, and, as the years go by, seems to inspire ever more elaborate lights and decorations, as a perhaps rather depraved and ghoulish stepchild of Christmas. The parties of New Year’s Eve and their sometimes regrettable overindulgence are followed by the parades and football of New Year’s Day.

By contrast, Thanksgiving is a quiet family day with a good meal. However, not every child is thrilled by that smothering hug from Great Aunt Bertha. And, whereas Thanksgiving once celebrated a successful harvest and the fruits of months of toil, few of us today live on farms or worry about an adequate supply of food for the winter. We can enjoy excellent meals at any time of the year. Our pumpkin pie crusts come from the grocery store. Our pie fillings and cranberries come from cans. And, if we’re so inclined, we can just skip the work and go to a restaurant. Our pioneer and pilgrim ancestors had no such options.

So how can we make Thanksgiving meaningful? I suggest—for myself as much as for anybody else—that we make it more than mere “Turkey Day.” How about doing what the day itself expressly asks us to do? How about giving thanks?

Certainly, a good exercise would be to create a list of things for which, as individuals and as families, we are thankful. We should thank God for them and, if possible, thank the people themselves. (It’s always good to do this explicitly. We may assume that they know of our gratitude. But maybe they don’t, and, in any case, it can never hurt to tell them directly. And it’s always good to do that sooner rather than later. You may not always have the opportunity, and—I speak here from personal experience—you’ll regret waiting too long to thank somebody who made a difference in your life for the better.)

This year, in the lead-up to Thanksgiving, I’ve tried to make a list for myself of people to whom I’m grateful, for things that I cannot repay. I don’t so much feel guilt at my long list of debts as joy at recognizing and acknowledging it.

In this column, a somewhat unusual one for me, I’m going to share something of my list, hoping that, while it’s very specific to my own life story, it might give you some ideas and encourage you to make one of your own. I’m hesitant about making my list public because I’ll inevitably omit some people whom I should include. But the perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good. My list won’t be exhaustive or adequate, but it will be better than no list at all.

My first earthly debt, of course, is to my parents, to my dedicated mother and to my gentle but strong father, whose kindness, integrity, and good reputation made my path in life much easier than it might have been. I can’t even begin to express or list what I owe them. My earliest memories involve visits—arranged specifically for me—to observatories, beaches, Catalina Island, museum exhibits on dinosaurs and Pre-Columbian archaeology, and an open house for a nuclear cargo ship, as well as being the only young child included in a business-related trip to Hawaii, back in a day when such trips were a very big deal. (Our tiny community newspaper reported on that Hawaiian trip.) My mother coached me on merit badges; my father accompanied Scout trips. They sent me to Europe before my mother had ever been there. (My father had already visited the Continent, sponsored by Franklin D. Roosevelt and under the leadership of General George S. Patton.) They were wonderful parents.

I realize that not everybody has wonderful parents. But some have enjoyed a blessing that I did not: Both of my grandfathers died before I was born; both of my grandmothers died when I was five years old. I scarcely remember them. I’ve always regretted not really having grandparents. Those who have had, or do have, should recognize their privilege.

I had only one brother—strictly speaking, a half-brother ten years my senior—and he’s been gone since 2012. We were unusually close. He was always supportive of my wife and me, and my children, and I miss him deeply. Sometimes I feel like an orphan. If you can, thank your brother or your sister for being there.

I’m thankful for my wife. I’m woefully unsentimental and, when I was growing up, I didn’t much care for terms like “my better half” or expressions like “I married up.” I regarded them as unserious fluff. Now, though, I know what they mean. I can’t imagine where I would be without her. She is by many degrees my superior in everything that really counts.

And my parents-in-law. They must have worried for their daughter when a perpetual student married her and immediately dragged her thousands of miles away to live in Egypt. But they didn’t complain, and they were always ready to help us out in every way possible. They’re both gone now. My wife’s father died early in 2025, aged ninety-eight. I hope that, when I see them again, they will feel that I did right by their daughter and by my portion of their posterity.

I’m grateful for my children, who, as they’ve grown up and become their own vivid, interesting personalities, have taught me about many things that would never have entered my world without them.

I’m thankful, too, for youth leaders and teachers who changed my life’s course. Tom and Mary Simmons, members of my Southern California ward, introduced me to the old regional BYU Education Week program. That’s where I first encountered Hugh Nibley, Truman Madsen, and others who would become pivotal influences on me. Were it not for Tom and Mary, I might never have come to Brigham Young University, and my life would have been completely different.

An older man who was briefly in my parents’ ward—sadly, I can’t even remember his name now—befriended me after my mission and introduced me to the art and antiquities at the Getty Villa in Malibu. I’ve returned many times since.

I belonged to a non-Church-affiliated Boy Scout troop. My Scoutmaster, an engineer by the name of George Schmidt, instilled a passionate love of mountains and backpacking in me. (When I was called to serve my mission in Switzerland, I was ecstatic.) My high school German teacher, Lenore Smith, not only taught me German but a love for German culture. In our final two years, she didn’t just teach the language; she taught us German art and architecture one year and German classical music during the other. (She had a degree in piano performance.) I learned the basic vocabulary for those subjects in German before I knew it in English, and I learned from her something of what it meant to be a cultured human being. For years, I tried to reach Mr. Schmidt and Miss Smith to thank them for the gifts they gave me, but I was unable. I had waited too long.

I’m grateful, too, for bishops and teachers in the Church who supported me and my family at difficult times and who eventually welcomed my father into the Kingdom and set my parents on the path to the Temple.

My father owned and ran a construction company, where I worked—not very effectively, I think—almost every summer from high school through graduate school. When I was a child, the employees there were a warm part of my extended family. It took me several years to discover that Joe Esparza and the three brothers Hank and Frank and Tino Beltran weren’t actually my uncles. And “Red” Faler, our huge, gruff, but warm-hearted mechanic, took charge of me as his assistant and errand boy when it would probably have been easier for him if I hadn’t been there “helping.”

My mission president, Edwin Q. Cannon, and his wife, Janath Russell Cannon, were models for me of selfless, quiet Church service, both during my mission and afterwards. I came to know them well while serving in the mission headquarters in Zürich.

During my undergraduate and graduate studies, there were many who appeared or even intervened at pivotal moments for me. Hugh Nibley and Truman Madsen, whom I’ve already mentioned, continued to be heroes and models for me even after I had joined the faculty at BYU myself, when, to my amazement, they became colleagues of mine. Tom Mackay, who taught me classical Greek, both intimidated and inspired me, and helped me in ways I can never repay.

S. Kent Brown created special courses for me when, having already received my bachelor’s degree, I joined his study abroad program in Jerusalem. And then, when my new wife and I showed up at the airport in Cairo (rather madly, with no firm plans for where we were going to stay in that vast and very foreign city and with no firm program of studies), he was there to greet us and to put us up while we looked for housing. Later, he played a significant role (with my friend Dilworth Parkinson and the dean of the College of Humanities, Richard Cracroft), in positioning me for a teaching job at BYU. The Cairo branch Relief Society president, Carol Naguib, not only helped my wife to find a life-sustaining teaching position at Cairo American College but also took us house-hunting and showed us the ropes of living in Egypt, as did Dil Parkinson. (The Cairo Branch was an irreplaceable lifeline and refuge for us, and Lani and Arnie Green and Doug and Christa Bradford and other members of that branch became lifelong friends.) Elhamy Naguib, an Egyptian artist and art historian and Carol’s husband, took us on weekend expeditions that offered us a unique window on the archaeological and artistic wonders of pharaonic, Christian, and Islamic Egypt.

I’m running out of space, but I’ll never run out of debts. Still, I must mention the generosity of the donors and volunteers for the Interpreter Foundation, who have made its work possible.

And I can’t omit our neighbors, past and present, who have not only been good friends but who have been there for us at times of crisis and need and even of emergencies. Tom Pittman, to choose just a single example, has spent scores and scores of hours helping me, an unteachable troglodyte, to overcome the (to me incomprehensible) challenges of computers. Nor can I fail to mention my counselors, when I was a bishop, who saved me from numerous mistakes. (Thank you, Chris Rotz!)

And, of course, more than anything, I’m grateful for the gift of a Savior and for his atonement, for the restoration of the Church through the Prophet Joseph Smith, for the missionaries who found my ancestors in New York and Yorkshire and Scotland, for the pioneers who sacrificed so much to build the Kingdom—I’ve just visited Mount Pisgah and Winter Quarters, and those sacrifices are much on my mind— and for the unspeakably wonderful plan of salvation.

A sometimes controversial proverb, perhaps but not certainly African, declares that “it takes a village to raise a child.” I don’t know why it should be controversial. A large village was definitely required to raise me—to the limited extent, anyway, that I can truthfully be said to have been raised at all.

Sir Isaac Newton, that titan who stands at the very dawn of modern science, is reported to have reflected that, “If I have seen further than others, it is only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.” I don’t claim to see further than anybody, but I know very well that I have been sustained throughout my life by others.

These are debts that I cannot ever pay back, so my only hope is to try, however poorly, to pay them forward. That phrase may now be clichéd, but it’s true nonetheless. And I think of the powerful warning of Deuteronomy 6:10-12:

“And it shall be, when the Lord thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, and houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full; then beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.”

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With such thoughts in mind, I invite you to consider the Giving Machines as part of your Thanksgiving and Christmas observance. See “As easy a way to do good as can be imagined” https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2025/11/as-easy-a-way-to-do-good-as-can-be-imagined.html.

For Elhamy Naguib’s artwork, see https://en.pixels.com. For the work of the Interpreter Foundation, see https://interpreterfoundation.org and https://witnessesfilm.com.