Which thank-you have I put off the longest?
For the country's first eighty-some years, Thanksgiving was a patchwork. Some states held one and some didn't, and the ones that did picked their own dates. Sarah Josepha Hale wanted one national day, the same Thursday for everybody.
Hale was a widow from New Hampshire who supported her five children largely by writing. She is generally credited with writing "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and for forty years she edited Godey's Lady's Book, one of the most widely read magazines in the country. She put that magazine to work. She ran editorials calling for a national Thanksgiving, wrote to governors, and wrote to one president after another. For roughly seventeen years, the answer was more or less nothing.
She kept writing. On September 28, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, she wrote again, this time to Abraham Lincoln. She asked him to make Thanksgiving "a National and fixed Union Festival." She was seventy-four years old.
Five days later, Lincoln signed a proclamation setting apart the last Thursday of November as a national day of thanksgiving. A president has proclaimed one every year since, and in 1941 Congress fixed the holiday on the fourth Thursday, where it lands today.
Hale's letters didn't ask for much: one day a year, set aside to give thanks. But nobody had to answer them, and for years nobody did. She could have decided it was too late, or that one more letter wouldn't matter. The one that finally landed came after years of letters that didn't.
Some of the notes still on your tree may feel stuck in that same spot. It's been a week, or a month, or a whole year since the thing happened, and it starts to feel too late to say anything. It almost never is. Hale was seventy-four and still asking. A note to your kid's coach about something from last spring is right on time. A late thank-you still lands.
The holiday your family just celebrated exists because one woman kept putting her hopes in writing and kept sending them. Look at the tree and find the note you've been putting off the longest.
Today, write it and send it, however late it feels.
Find the note you've put off the longest, on the tree or in your head.
Write it today. If it feels late, you can say so in one line ("I should have told you this months ago") and then say the thanks.
Put it in a mailbox or hand it over.
In your gratitude journal, write down one thing someone kept doing for you this year, long after they could have stopped.
Kids' story: read "The Slowest Thank-You" together, from The Thank-You Adventure in Wanderful Woods.
Time: 15 to 20 minutes, plus the delivery.
With kids: ask, "Did you know Thanksgiving almost didn't become a holiday? Who do you think should get a letter from you?"
Sunday mail: most post offices are closed today, but a note dropped in a mailbox tonight goes out first thing tomorrow.
In the tightest years, Left Overs is only one or two days. Use the days in order and stop when November 30 arrives. If even that feels like too much, go straight to Hands. The notes matter most, because on November 30 nothing carries into December unsent.
Some families like a second table. A Friendsgiving during Left Overs is a natural place to hand Community leaves to friends who weren't with you on Thanksgiving, and either Feast Echo from the back of this book works at that table too.
Hello, my wonderful story friends! Last time, Mr. Moose and Mr. Monkey climbed Lookout Ledge and let go of the leaves with no names, and Everest Eagle carried them all the way to the top of his cliff. Today, Tessie tells a secret she’s kept for a very long time.
Is there a thank-you you’ve been waiting a long time to say? Let’s go see what Tessie has been waiting for.
It was a soft, snowy Sunday in Wanderful Woods. Big lazy flakes drifted down over Sunny Square, landing on the Wishing Tree, on the squash lantern glowing on its branch, and on all the presents still scattered around in the snow.
Tessie was still there.
“Tessie,” said Mr. Monkey, “when are you going home?”
Tessie thought about it for a long time. “Oh,” she said. “I’ll start… soon. Maybe… by spring.”
“Hee hee hee!” went Mr. Monkey.
But Tessie wasn’t sitting by the fire this morning. She was sitting at the foot of Pilgrim Point, the giant old pine, with her head tipped all the way back, looking up at the high branch where Orion slept.
“Tessie?” said Mr. Moose. “What are you looking at?”
Tessie was quiet. Then she said, very slowly, “A thank-you… I never said.”
Mr. Moose and Mr. Monkey sat down in the snow beside her.
“When I was very small,” said Tessie, “smaller than an acorn… I slipped off a rock into Whispering Water Way. The water was fast. It rolled me over and over… and carried me away.” She closed her eyes.
“Then something swooped down out of the sky. A young owl. He scooped me right out of the water… and set me down on a big, flat, warm rock.”
“Your rock!” said Mr. Monkey. “Your sunning rock!”
“My rock,” said Tessie. “I’ve sat on it… ever since.”
She looked up at Orion’s branch again.
“I never said thank you. First, I was too little. Then, I was too shy. And then…” She was quiet for a long time. “And then it had been so long… it felt too late.”
“How long?” whispered Mr. Monkey.
“A long… long… time.”
Mr. Monkey felt it in his chest, big and warm and hurting all at once. Tessie had been carrying her thank-you around for longer than almost anybody in the whole woods had been alive. Longer than his mama. Longer than the big maple, maybe.
“It’s not too late!” he said. “It’s NOT. You have to tell him!”
“He’s… up there,” said Tessie. “And I’m… down here.”
Tessie decided to try climbing. She put one front foot on the trunk of Pilgrim Point. Then she thought about the next foot. She thought about it for a long time.
Mr. Monkey went and helped Mama Moose shovel snow. He came back.
“How far did you get?”
Tessie looked up at the trunk. “One… step.”
“Heh… heh… heh,” she laughed, very slowly, at herself.
Bruno came over to help. He picked Tessie up very gently in his two big paws and held her up over his head, as high as he could reach, standing on his tiptoes.
“Higher,” said Tessie.
Bruno climbed up on a stump and held her up again, wobbling.
“Higher… please.”
Bruno looked up at Orion’s branch, way, way up in the top of the pine. Then he looked at Tessie. “I’m not tall enough,” he said. “I’m only one Bruno.”
Mr. Moose was thinking. He remembered the leaf with no name, and how they had sent it all the way to the top of the Wishing Tree. A long vine. Over a high branch. And somebody pulling, slow and steady, at the bottom.
“Mr. Monkey,” he said slowly. “What if Tessie goes up the way the sunrise leaf did?”
Mr. Monkey’s eyes went wide. “In a BASKET!”
Mr. Monkey climbed up Pilgrim Point with a long vine, all the way up to the branch right next to Orion’s, and threw it over and down. Daddy Monkey brought his biggest basket. Ricky tied the vine to the handle with his best knot, the one that never slips. Tessie climbed in, very slowly.
And Mr. Moose took the other end of the vine in his teeth, with Bruno right behind him, holding on gently, and they walked backward across the snow, one slow step at a time.
The basket rose. Up past the bottom branches. Up past the snow on the needles. And as it went, it began to turn, slowly, around and around.
“Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” said Tessie.
It was the slowest wheee anybody had ever heard. It lasted all the way past the middle of the tree.
“Hee hee hee… SNORT!” went Hazel, watching from below.
Mr. Monkey was climbing up beside the basket to make sure Tessie was okay, when the vine caught his tail. It wrapped right around it, and up he went too, hanging upside down underneath the basket, spinning slowly around with Tessie.
“Mr. Moose,” he called down, upside down. “I’m going too!”
“Ha-ha-ha!” laughed Mr. Moose, through the vine in his teeth, and he kept on pulling, slow and steady.
Then the basket stopped. It hung in the air, gently swaying, right in front of Orion’s branch, with Tessie in it and Mr. Monkey dangling underneath.
The afternoon was getting late, and the snow had stopped. Orion opened one golden eye. Then the other. There, right in front of his branch, was a turtle in a basket.
“Hoo?” said Orion.
Tessie looked at him. She took a long, slow breath.
“Thank you,” she said. “For pulling me out… of Whispering Water Way. When I was very small.”
Orion didn’t say anything. He didn’t move at all. He looked at Tessie for so long that a snowflake landed on his head and he didn’t even notice.
“That little turtle,” he said at last. “That was you?”
“It was me.”
Orion’s feathers fluffed up, slowly, all over. “All these years,” he said softly, “I’ve wondered whether that little turtle was all right.”
“I was,” said Tessie. “I am.”
And the two oldest friends in Wanderful Woods looked at each other across the cold air, and neither of them said anything else for a long, long time. They didn’t need to.
Mr. Monkey, hanging underneath, felt something warm all the way down to his tail. It wasn’t too late. Not even a little bit.
Mr. Moose let the basket down slowly, slowly, until Tessie and Mr. Monkey were back in the snow. Then Orion looked down from his branch at Sunny Square, at all the presents lying scattered around the Wishing Tree.
Ricky was over there, gathering them up into one neat pile. Beside the pile lay a brand-new piece of bark, with nothing written on it yet.
“Orion,” called Mr. Monkey. “Ricky wants to give all the presents away. The other way. Not a swap. Just giving. But we don’t know who they’re for.”
Orion blinked his round golden eyes. “Hoo,” he said. “Who do you suppose they’re for?”
Then he spread his wings and glided off into the evening, to find his supper.
Everybody looked at the pile. Mr. Monkey looked at it. Ricky looked at it. Shiloh, who had wished that nobody would be left out, looked at it longest of all.
“Somebody who needs them,” said Shiloh softly.
“Somebody who didn’t get anything,” said Ricky. He picked up the new bark. At the very top, in big letters, he wrote: WHO NEEDS THEM?
“Then we find them,” said Mr. Moose. “And we give them the presents.”
“And we don’t even tell them it’s us!” said Mr. Monkey. Then he looked over at the squash lantern, glowing on its branch. “And we take the lantern.”
“Somewhere that needs it,” said Mr. Moose.
“What a day!” said Mr. Monkey. “Tessie climbed one step. Bruno held her up, but he’s only one Bruno. Then Tessie rode up Pilgrim Point in a basket, going wheeeee, the slowest wheee ever, and I went up too, by my tail. Tessie said thank you to Orion after a long, long time. And now we’re going to give the presents away.”
Mr. Monkey whistled, and Mr. Moose hummed, and together they sang:
We are better together,
Moose and Monkey forever.
And beside the neat pile of presents in Sunny Square, the little lantern glowed on, waiting to go somewhere new.