Every morning, I arrive at the pier with empty hands and an open heart, ready for whatever sunrise God chooses to paint. I don’t demand yesterday’s colors or insist on last Thursday’s tangerine fire. I simply show up, anticipate glory, and receive what comes.

But Thanksgiving? I arrive at Thanksgiving with a script written in my mother’s hand, frustrated when God rewrites the scenes.

Cranberry sauce, sweet potato and green bean casseroles, chestnut stuffing, turkey carved into white and dark meat, and a bowl of black olives right beside my plate. Mom used her best china and sterling silver, set against an autumn backdrop with just the right tablecloths, placemats, and centerpieces. Throughout the day, I’d smell savory dishes cooking and taste the excitement building. Before we ate, each family member took a turn sharing what they were most grateful for that year. Simple. Instructive. Mine to inherit.

Or so I thought.

The Inheritance Misunderstood

I have dishware to serve twelve, carefully collected over years of anticipating the day I’d host Thanksgiving exactly as my mother had. I memorized her recipes, practiced her timing, prepared to recreate those perfect November afternoons when everyone fit around one table and gratitude moved in an orderly circle.

But Mom’s real inheritance wasn’t in the sterling silver or the perfect place settings. Every morning, she woke before dawn and disappeared into the sunporch, to what she called her Agape corner. She began each day praying and meditating on scripture. No matter how busy she was, she’d claim she had too much to do NOT to spend time with God first.

I understand that now in a way I didn’t as a child or as a single adult. My time at the pier each morning strengthens my soul, girds me up for the obstacles I’ll face, and reframes the world from God’s perspective instead of mine. Yet somehow, watching her create those flawless Thanksgivings, I thought the lesson was about recreating, not receiving. I missed that her Agape corner was teaching her to surrender the day she planned for the day God was actually giving her.

The Thanksgiving I Never Planned

This Thursday, my green bean casserole will sit beside arroz con gandules. The turkey will arrive already cooked, in aluminum foil, nothing like the golden bird my mother would baste for hours. We’ll use paper plates because Tony’s Puerto Rican family is too large for anyone’s fine china. Some will sit at tables, some will stand in the kitchen, some will eat in the family room. The meal will start later than planned, always does, as dishes arrive when they arrive.

The Thanksgivings I grew up with were orchestrated by one woman’s vision—my mother’s. The Thanksgiving I’m hosting Thursday will be… a collaboration. A sometimes messy, often surprising merger of traditions, personalities, and definitions of what “hosting” means.

My dishware for twelve sits mostly unused. The menu I carefully planned shifts and morphs as others contribute their own traditions, their own timing, their own understanding of celebration. The hostess I thought I’d become—my mother at her dining room table, every detail under her graceful control—that woman exists only in my imagination.

Learning to Receive the Sunrise

This morning at the pier, the sky arrived in colors I’d never seen before—threads of gold weaving through pewter clouds like God was experimenting with a new technique. I could have missed it entirely if I was waiting for last Thursday’s tangerine fire to repeat itself. Instead, I watched this entirely different glory unfold, grateful I’d shown up with eyes wide enough to see.

Some mornings I arrive at the pier and the sky is already changing without me—clouds moving in patterns I didn’t anticipate, colors appearing where I didn’t expect them. I can stand there demanding Thursday’s perfect orange glow, or I can receive what’s actually happening: a different kind of beauty, one I didn’t orchestrate.

What if I approached Thanksgiving like sunrise? What if I showed up with that same breathless anticipation, ready to be surprised by whatever configuration of family, food, and blessing God assembles at my table?

The Grace Before the Feast

Perhaps this is why Mom needed her Agape corner every morning—not just to prepare for the day she planned, but to release the day she planned for the day God was actually giving her. Perhaps she, too, sat with disappointments I never saw, surrendering them before sunrise so she could receive the day with grace.

In that simple act of practicing gratitude around her table, we’d set our hearts on blessings to come in the next calendar year, anticipating future gratitude reserved for next November. But maybe the deeper lesson was learning to anticipate without attachment, to hope without demanding the details match our dreams.

Thanksgiving at Dawn

This Thursday, I’ll wake before dawn and go to the pier. I’ll watch God paint whatever sky He chooses—maybe spectacular, maybe ordinary, certainly unexpected. And I’ll practice what the sunrise teaches: that beauty rarely arrives in the form we expected, that grace means receiving what comes with open hands, that thanksgiving—real thanksgiving—begins when we stop insisting the sun rise in yesterday’s colors.

The aluminum foil will glint in candlelight. Spanish and English will mingle like sunrise colors bleeding into sky. My grandmother’s serving spoon will rest beside disposable plates. The gratitude won’t move in an orderly circle but will bubble up in laughter and stories, in the beautiful chaos of families learning to merge their thanksgivings into something new.

When I was young, watching my mother’s perfect Thanksgivings unfold, I’d anticipate the future—dreaming of the day I’d recreate her magic. Now I understand: the magic wasn’t in the recreation. It was in her morning surrender, her daily practice of trading her plans for God’s surprises.

This year, I’m grateful for the lesson hidden in every sunrise: that God’s blessings rarely match our blueprints. They arrive wearing aluminum foil instead of sterling silver, boasting cultures I’m still learning, teaching us that love looks different than we imagined—messier, louder, later than planned, and somehow exactly what we needed.

The ham I ordered, picked up, paid for? It won’t appear magically like my mother’s did. But something else will—grace, unplanned and undeserved, seasoning whatever meal we manage to assemble.

That’s anticipation. That’s thanksgiving. That’s where I embrace God’s unexpected blessings.