In the United States, people are encouraged to ponder the things for which they are thankful from the day after Halloween until after the New Year holiday.  Whether it is a religious or secular tradition, most people are thankful for things like good health, or friends and family.  That's all very thoughtful and nice.  However, I think we should expand our thankful attitude toward ubiquitous things in our standard of living in order to appreciate them more fully, especially when several billion people on our little spinning ball of mud don't have those things.

For example, people don't carve into their Thanksgiving Day turkey and exclaim, "Thanks be to Thomas Edison for the lights over the dining room table!"  Certain things have become an under-appreciated given variable in the equation defining our modern life.  One need only look toward the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to appreciate the more basic things on the heirarchy of human needs.  Indeed, just open your eyes and look around the globe.

In that spirit of being thankful for common place things in my life, I wish to give thanks to Mrs. Ruth Graves Wakefield.  Why?  She invented the chocolate chip cookie.