Now that November 3rd is behind us, we can move on to more enlightening topics instead of heated ones. The big topic this month is always Thanksgiving. (Every year, Dan asks me when Thanksgiving is, and I have to tell him it’s the third Thursday in November and that it’s always on a Thursday. It’s the closest thing we have to a secular movable feast. But I digress.)

I have lots of memories of Thanksgivings past. When I was a kid, we always drove to Granny’s house, where we would partake of the traditional spread of turkey, etc. Then, while the adults lapsed into food comas, one of the relatives would drop us kids off at the movies where, happily sugared up on pie, we would view G or PG films (although the rating system didn’t exist at the time).

(I don’t remember going around the table and saying what each of us was thankful for. There wasn’t a table large enough, so we simply filled our plates and dispersed throughout the house to find comfortable chairs. It was uber-casual. No one dressed up. The whole procedure was repeated at Christmas. But I digress again.)

Since then, there have been many memorable Thanksgivings. There was the year when we were broke, and the local civic center dropped off a box of turkey and fixings, unaware that Dan’s minimum-wage job provided free turkeys to employees.

Then there was the year my sister shrieked in horror when she learned I was making lasagna instead of turkey. (She was always a bit of a traditionalist. She insisted on reading 16 magazine when she was 16 and 17 magazine at 17, even though their target audiences skewed younger. I suppose, if it existed, she would have read 32 magazine at age 32. But I digress yet again.) Other years we have had takeout sushi for Thanksgiving dinner.

The Thanksgiving dinners I remember best were the ones in later years that were held at my mother’s house. There would be a small gathering, usually consisting of immediate family and sometimes a friend or two. We usually got a turkey and accoutrements from Kroger and followed the tradition of loading up our plates and retiring to the living room to eat off the coffee table and the folding card table.

(One year was particularly memorable because Dan’s friend, my mother, and I gathered, and I prepared a big pot of ratatouille that almost killed our friend John with a bay leaf. (I have written about this occasion before in a post called “The Great Thanksgiving Ratatouille.” ) But I digress some more.)

But that’s not what I came here to write about today. In this time of giving thanks, I want to consider how we express our thanks to others.

The easiest way is also the simplest. Just say, “thanks.” This is appropriate for small courtesies like passing the salt. If someone holds the door open for you when your arms are full, “Thanks so much” seems called for. (Sometimes if I’m really burdened, I’ll add, “You’re a gentleman and a scholar,” which usually gets at least a smile. (I don’t know any equivalent for a woman.) But I digress yet again.) If a child holds the door open, I’ll thank them warmly and acknowledge the parent too.

One phrasing of thanks I’ve heard lately is an alternative to “I appreciate it,” namely “I appreciate you.” I like that a lot, but it doesn’t roll easily off my tongue. Too many years of saying “that” or “it” instead of “you” have conditioned me to find the new formulation sounding odd, especially as thanks for small courtesies.

But however awkward it may feel to me, I think it’s a lovely way of giving thanks, in any month.