Dear Reader, 

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the Monitor’s Thanksgiving cover story is about letters of gratitude.  

Giving thanks this time of year is part of our national heritage in the United States, a heritage that includes the rituals of meals surrounded by family and dear friends. Many of these gatherings might feature heated discussions about the meaning of our country’s complicated history and competing visions of our common life together.

As a writer who covers politics and culture, I share stories about the lives we live and the values that animate us as part of my job. This includes the kinds of discussions we have, say, during holiday rituals with those we love, even when they challenge our patience, if not our points of view.

When we decided to write a cover story on gratitude, we asked readers to send in personal stories about sending and receiving thank-you notes. So many Monitor readers and others graciously shared their experiences with me, showing me letters that carry deep personal meaning and allowing me to share them with you.

So I decided to write this story as my own personal letter of gratitude to you, dear reader.

Right now, as I tap these words on the screen in front of me, I feel not just a sense of gratitude, but even a bit of awe that you decided to take the time to read the work I do for the Monitor.

During the past few years of pandemic quarantines and the stormy, sometimes violent state of American politics, gratitude has seldom informed my day to day. 

But as I listened to your experiences, talked to scientists who study expressions of gratitude as a human phenomenon, and interviewed authors who embarked on personal journeys to find important people in their lives and write to them, my own experience reporting this story has been both personal and perhaps even transformative. 

The letters I’m sharing with you sprang from moments of joy and sorrow, tragedy and celebration, hope and despair. Some arrived with the force of the unexpected, followed by a spontaneous and lingering glow of human connection.

There’s a special note of gratitude I’d like to send out to Nancy Bourcier in Surprise, Arizona. She was among the first to respond to a query about this project, and she wanted to share a thank-you note from her new granddaughter-in-law, Ecko Soulé, after her bridal shower in June. 

In our first exchange, Mrs. Bourcier told me, “As a side note, I’ve been reading the Monitor for over 75 years, and when I was very young, my mother read special articles to me.”

After her husband died and her children and grandchildren scattered throughout the West, she started a “gratitude vase,” keeping a clear glass vase next to her chair with a stack of multicolored 3x5 notepads for about five years. 

“Every night I wrote one note with something I was particularly grateful for that day,” Mrs. Bourcier says. “I saw that vase filling with colorful notes of gratitude throughout the year. Each New Year’s Day I poured them all out and read each one. They were not dated, and were in random order. I felt gratitude all over again with each note I read.”

She cannot contain her joy about her new granddaughter-in-law. “Ecko is a very loving, fun, and creative gal, and we are thrilled and grateful to have her in our family! After the wedding, she decided to call me ‘Grandma.’” 

The kindness and warmth of our communications helped set the tone for this experience. The generosity of these longtime Monitor readers began to impress on me the wider contexts of my work. In a different way, I started to see it as a part of something larger, while at the same time feel it in a much more personal way.

Karen Norris/Staff

I talked to Nancy Davis Kho, who embarked on a project to write 50 letters of gratitude, one almost every week during the year she would turn 50.

“It was a project just to make this year different from other birthdays, since it felt a little monumental,” says Ms. Davis Kho, author of “The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time.” 

“I thought, every week I’m going to pick one person who has helped shape or inspire me. And I just kept coming back to those same three words: helped, shaped, inspired. And I’m going to thank them for the way that they did that for me, because I am the person I am because of the people I have known.”

She wrote her first two letters to her parents the first two weeks of January. “My dad was so cute. He called up, he said, ‘Oh, Nance, I love the letter.’ And he framed it and hung it over his desk. Six months later, out of nowhere, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he died six weeks after that. So all of a sudden.”

I shared with her my own story. Just before I turned 50, my father, too, was diagnosed with terminal cancer on Thanksgiving weekend, and he died six weeks later, on New Year’s Eve. So all of a sudden.

Her project took on a very different meaning, giving it a greater sense of urgency.  

“One of the things that was very comforting to me was this knowledge that my dad had sat there with this letter, where, spelled out on a page, was what, specifically, he meant to me, what he taught me, and why I was grateful,” she says. “And that was a great comfort to me. And then that loss also triggered, I think, a more profound understanding of gratitude and connection through writing these letters.”

She was disappointed at first when her book came out just before the pandemic started. She wasn’t able to tour and connect with readers.

“But having heard from readers since then, I think it came out at exactly the right time, because people connected with this idea of when there’s a difficult time, there are still things to be grateful for,” Ms. Davis Kho says. “That was my takeaway in writing the letters – it permanently changed the way I view the world, because I know that even hidden in the darkest of times, there are still things to be grateful for, and they give you a sense of hope.”

It has become clear over the past few decades that even small expressions of sincere gratitude can allow our bodies to rejuvenate after periods of stress and moments of perceived danger. 

“I study happiness, and gratitude is something that’s really known to facilitate happiness and improve well-being – it’s now been about 20 years that we’ve known that,” says Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

“But it occurred to me and my collaborator that it seems like people don’t walk around in their everyday lives giving thanks to people all that often,” he says. “Sure, Thanksgiving comes along once a year, but there are lots of opportunities to express our appreciation to other people, but we don’t always take advantage of those opportunities. And so that’s what made us curious as to why people might not, even though they would likely be better off if they did.”

Kristi Nelson, executive director of A Network for Grateful Living, takes a more spiritual approach to the practice of gratitude. 

“I talk about gratitude as a fleeting emotion,” she says. “Basically, it’s a response to something good that happens, right? ... But that makes it highly conditional and also elusive, because life does not always unfold the way that we want it to,” continues Ms. Nelson, author of “Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted.” 

“We’re used to feeling gratitude when everything goes our way,” she says. “But life doesn’t allow things to go our way all the time, so how do we bring those benefits of gratitude alive in our lives more consistently and more reliably and more deeply?”

Karen Norris/Staff

Nicki Sutherland shared an email from a police officer who was one of the many first responders who sprang to action after the July Fourth shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, which killed seven people and injured 48 others. Ms. Sutherland is the executive director of Gratitude Generation, a nonprofit that, as she puts it, “aims to get even the youngest of volunteers involved in learning gratitude and giving back to others.” After the shooting, she helped groups of young volunteers prepare hundreds of large, reusable water cups, filling them with snacks and granola bars for first responders.

“Every volunteer who was there created probably, like, 10 thank you cards each, one to go in each of the water bottles,” she says. “The thank you cards kind of blew their minds, and we didn’t realize it would blow their minds.” 

Ms. Sutherland,

I am a police officer in the Northwest suburbs, and when I arrived to work the midnight shift the other day I was surprised to find a water bottle filled with treats. ... Unfortunately, as a long-time police officer, whenever something is dropped off for us I tend to question who dropped it off and what was their motive for doing so. 

To be perfectly honest with you, if homemade food items are dropped off, they rarely get eaten for fear that something was put in the food to do us harm. That being said, I really appreciated the water bottle and store-bought treats. The bottle was a good reminder that I do need to drink more water, and the snacks are often needed when I have a busy shift and need a quick bite to eat.

But what really touched me the most was the handwritten note inside the bottle. It came on a day when I was lacking motivation and questioning my chosen profession. The note revitalized me and reminded me that we really are appreciated in the community. This note now sits on my desk as a daily reminder of that.

“The way forward, and the way to spread more love and kindness and gratitude, is to just keep doing things like this,” Ms. Sutherland says. “You never know what little thing will touch someone so deeply, and you never know what the repercussions of that are going to be.” 

Penny Sansevieri organizes expressions of gratitude to members of the U.S. armed forces overseas during the holidays. For the past decade her marketing firm has coordinated groups of volunteers, including school-age children, to prepare Christmas stockings with gifts and snacks and letters of gratitude for service members. 

“I just think it’s so often forgotten, and not a lot of people are inspired to do this anymore,” she told me. “I’m sure the Christmas stocking that we send them isn’t just going to make up for being separated from their families, but at least they know that they’re appreciated.”

But the gestures of appreciation from service members in Afghanistan touched her deeply, Ms. Sansevieri says. She keeps a voicemail one soldier left for her years ago: 

I’m calling from Afghanistan, and we just received all the care packages. ... So I just personally wanted to call back and tell you, God bless you and thank you for thinking about our soldiers. There’s not too many who do that nowadays. You’re a true patriot, and God bless you and all the people who made this possible. It put a smile on everybody’s face. ... I definitely did not want to pass up the opportunity to call and thank you personally. God bless you and have a great Christmas.  

The soldier did more to express his unit’s gratitude. Ms. Sansevieri chokes up as she describes a framed U.S. flag they sent her. The flag was flown during combat, and included an official certificate as an expression of their gratitude. 

“That flag that they flew in combat – it was extremely unexpected,” Ms. Sansevieri says. “And on the back – you can’t see it – they all signed the certificate, and it was tremendous. I can’t even,” she says in tears.

As part of their research, Dr. Kumar of UT Austin and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago designed a study that enlisted participants to write letters of gratitude to people who impacted them. Afterward, the researchers asked them to predict how their recipients would feel after receiving the letter.

“We subsequently followed up with those recipients to measure how they actually felt,” Dr. Kumar says.

There was a measurable disjunction: Senders significantly underestimated how positive they would make their recipients feel, while at the same time significantly overestimating how awkward and uncomfortable they would feel.

“[Recipients are] focused on the fact that you’re conveying warmth and sincerity and you did something nice for them and you’re showing your appreciation for them,” Dr. Kumar says. “They’re thinking about that, as opposed to the specific words that you use to express your gratitude.”

“So I think a better understanding of our daily lives, the day-to-day interactions that we have, can speak to how our lives might be improved and the things that perhaps we should be doing more often,” he continues. “We’re a social species, and we know that positive relationships are essential for our happiness.”

Karen Norris/Staff

That brings me to Kent Syler, a professor of political science and public policy at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. He sent along a letter sent to him by a former student, Mitchell Casto, who now teaches U.S. government at a high school in Silver Spring, Maryland. Dr. Syler says that he always feels hopeful for our country’s future when he receives messages like this from current and former students.

Good Morning Professor Syler,

I hope you are well, sir. I am in my first year of teaching and it has gone very well. I teach AP US Government, and it has been extremely easy because of all I learned from you. I want to thank you for all of the knowledge that you instilled in me. I learned more from you than any other class in college. My students have actually been conducting their own campaigns, modeled after your course, as an end of the year project. They really like it and are having fun so on behalf of them and myself, Thank you. Also, living in MD just outside of D.C., I am still fighting the good fight. I am volunteering for a man running for state delegate, canvassing and calling. I also attended the National March For Our Lives rally in D.C. this weekend. Again with a “Veterans for Gun Reform” sign. ... I just wanted to thank you for giving me the tools to help become the best member of society I can be. I am able to be so politically active and successful because of you. Thank you for everything and all that you do, sir. I hope you and your family are doing well.

Very Respectfully,

Mitchell Alan Casto

When I talked to Mr. Casto, he spoke, in very emotional terms, about what his former professor meant to him. 

“I just wanted to reach out to him and tell him thank you, because last year was my first year teaching, and after studying under him for so long I just thought he deserves to know what an impact he had on myself, and what an impact it’s having on my kids,” he says. “Not only does he teach classrooms of students; his teaching, his dedication, his craft are still being passed on to a whole new generation of children in a different state.”

As an adjunct professor of religion at Hunter College, where I’ve taught evening classes for over 20 years, I felt myself thinking of the hundreds of students who’ve passed through my classrooms. Another personal experience, another conversation that widened my own contexts, another sense of gratitude for Dr. Syler’s and Mr. Casto’s generosity in sharing this letter.

I sometimes work with Daniel DeVries, the senior director of communications and media relations at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. This time, his response left me a bit stunned, and a bit without words.

“I was adopted at three days old, and I never knew my biological parents,” he told me. “Had a great life, but then both of my parents died in 2020. My dad died from COVID in a nursing home, and my mom passed away three weeks later.”

In the midst of this loss, Mr. DeVries wanted to finally find his birth mother. After some determined research, he found her: Pamela Calzadilla, CEO of Meals on Wheels in West Palm Beach, Florida. He wrote to her:

Dear Pamela,

I realize this message is out of the blue, but given the state of the world I wanted to reach out and make contact. I’m about 99% sure you are my birth mother. ... 

I just wanted to thank you for putting me up for adoption. I have had a spectacular life. ... I have a great job as the Media Relations Director at Colgate University, an amazing wife who also works at Colgate, and you have two smart-as-a-whip grandchildren named Lucy (11) and Nora (6). Feel free to take a look through my Facebook feed to see what they look like! 

Anyway, I always said I wouldn’t try to find my biological parents until my parents were gone, and sadly they have now both passed. My mom died May 19 night in her sleep after many years of heart problems, and my dad died from COVID in a nursing home in Warwick on May 1.

I completely understand if this comes as a shock, and I also completely understand if that’s a time in your life that you don’t want to revisit. I don’t know the circumstances around my adoption and I don’t want you to think there’s any pressure to talk with me or anything, but I wanted to put the option out there, and I wanted you to know I turned out OK and that your decision resulted in not only a wonderful childhood for me, but also this new chapter with my girls.

I found you after getting a copy of my original birth certificate a few months back after NYS opened up adoptee records. If you want to hear what I sound like, I host a podcast for Colgate University. 

I hope we have a chance to talk! If not, then please just take this note as a very warm thank you.

With regards,

Dan DeVries

Ms. Calzadilla also shared her experiences with me, describing her reactions after receiving her son’s letter.

“I never had children after Daniel, and once I hit my late 50s, I felt that void in my life,” she says. “Hard to explain. I never get depressed. But then, all of a sudden, I realized that I missed the child I gave away.”

“Then, suddenly, he reached out, and it made me feel like my prayers were answered,” Ms. Calzadilla continues. “I had always wondered about him, and if I made the right decision at such a young age. ...

“I cried and was so overjoyed by his beautiful email letting me know about his life and that I had two grandchildren,” she says. “It was such a blessing to know he had become such a wonderful man and was raised by loving parents. It’s what every woman hopes for when giving a child up for adoption.

“I’m so grateful to be part of my son’s life,” she says, “and happy that he has filled a void in my life that no one could fill but him.” 

The result in Kazakhstan’s presidential election last weekend may have been thoroughly predictable. It was, after all, a whopping 81.3% victory for President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, anointed successor to Nursultan Nazarbayev, the ruler since Soviet times of a Central Asian republic widely viewed as a typical post-Soviet autocracy.

But some analysts say that what’s happening in Kazakhstan is not simply another case of a regime transitioning rulers while maintaining the same old order.

Rather, they suggest that an example of an old-fashioned leader turned champion of necessary change – the classic case is Mikhail Gorbachev – could be rising on the troubled steppes of Kazakhstan. Mr. Tokayev’s election, though widely panned in the West as lacking competition, could herald sweeping changes, including domestic economic and political reforms, as well as a foreign policy stance that distances the country from its traditional sponsor, Russia, in favor of greater openness to the world.

“Tokayev has stated his intention to make Kazakhstan a more inclusive society, more democratic, decentralize to give more functions to regions, strengthen the parliament, and reduce the powers of the presidency,” says Andrey Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the foreign ministry. “The Russia-Ukraine conflict has also presented an opportunity to diversify Kazakhstan’s relationships, to open up the system.

“Tokayev has declared that his country will pursue a multivector foreign policy, which means expanding contacts with the world, not just the U.S. and Europe, but also countries like India and Turkey,” Mr. Kortunov adds. “This tendency became quite explicit after the war [in Ukraine] started, and it does pose a challenge to Moscow.”

Critiquing Moscow ...

Mr. Tokayev’s call for snap elections in September was driven by the profound economic dysfunctions and inequalities that have troubled post-Soviet Kazakhstan, so severe that they triggered mass unrest, leading to a brief Russian-led military intervention in January to restore stability.

Russia’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine has been disquieting for many countries of the region, none more so than Kazakhstan, which resembles Ukraine in having a large Russian minority and post-Soviet borders that have been disputed, not by the Kremlin, but many leading Russian nationalists.

Dmitry Azarov/Sputnik/Reuters

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev attend the summit of leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Astana, Kazakhstan, Oct. 14, 2022. Mr. Tokayev has been unusually critical of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in September, Mr. Tokayev offered a tough critique, without mentioning Russia by name, of big powers that are undermining the reliable old international order and ushering in a “new, more chaotic and unpredictable one. ... The world is falling prey to a new set of military conflicts. For the first time in two generations, we face the prospect of the use of nuclear weapons, and not even as a last resort.”

Analysts say that, despite growing unease in the capital of Astana with the Ukraine war, Kazakhstan doesn’t appear to be planning on a radical break with Russia anytime soon. Kazakhstan has no border with Europe, they note, while both Russia and China are immediate neighbors. And Russia, which pulled the Kazakh leadership’s chestnuts out of the fire during the January unrest, remains the country’s primary security provider. Most analysts add that much will depend on how the Ukraine war concludes.

“Kazakhstan adheres to a policy of neutrality, maintaining relations with both Russia and Ukraine, and adhering to the principles of territorial integrity, independence, and sovereignty,” says Yury Buluktayev, an expert at the official Institute of Philosophy, Political Science and Religious Studies in Almaty, Kazakhstan. “We can’t predict the future course of our relations with Russia until the war ends.

“Meanwhile, we’ll continue developing our relations in all directions,” he adds. “Recently we have discussed the idea of strategic partnership with the European Union. The multivector policy teaches that many diverse interests should be taken into account.”

... But tied closely to Russia

Russia’s war in Ukraine has produced contradictory economic effects in the region. Several countries of Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, used to provide millions of migrant workers to power the once-booming Russian economy. Most of those workers have now returned home amid Russia’s shifting wartime economic conditions. In their place, nearly 3 million Ukrainian refugees now get top employment priority.

“Kazakhstan was never a source of migrant labor for Russia, but some of our neighbors have suffered serious losses of revenue as their people are coming home,” says Andrei Chebotaryov, director of Alternativa, an independent political think tank in Almaty. “We have different economic issues as a result of Russians moving to Kazakhstan, relocating businesses here and navigating the Western sanctions regime” against Russia.

Yao Dawei/Xinhua/AP

Chinese leader Xi Jinping (left) walks with Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as he arrives at the Nursultan Nazarbayev International Airport for a state visit to Kazakhstan, Sept. 14, 2022, in Astana.

In the weeks following the Kremlin’s September decree to mobilize army reservists, nearly 300,000 Russians, mostly military-aged men, poured into Kazakhstan. The Kazakh government reported in late October that it had received about 200,000 applications for individual work permits from foreigners since the Russian mobilization began.

That potentially reverses a long-term demographic trend that has seen members of Kazakhstan’s Russian minority gradually emigrate back to Russia, reducing the proportion from around 40% to 15% over about three decades. Experts say no one is sure how the newcomers may fit in, how long most of them will stay, or what the sociological consequences might be.

Thousands of Russian companies are registered in Kazakhstan – a long-standing trading partner of Russia – but the numbers have grown by around 40% since the beginning of the war. Businesses are scrambling to establish a base from which they can escape the scorching effects of Western sanctions while maintaining their presence in the Russian market.

Analysts say this is a huge boon for Kazakhstan, and to a lesser extent Uzbekistan, but one which has the effect of tying their economies more tightly to that of Russia. It also potentially complicates relations with the United States, which cannot be pleased to see a Kazakhstan-sized hole in the anti-Russia sanctions regime.

“The world order is changing”

Another factor that effectively binds the countries of Central Asia to Moscow is the threat of instability in nearby Afghanistan. Kazakhstan and its former-Soviet neighbors are deeply dependent on Russian security protection, and most are bound organizationally into the Collective Security Treaty Organization military alliance and the economics-oriented Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China and India.

“It’s just a reality that the world order is changing, but Kazakhstan remains under the influence of Russia and China, and this influence is much stronger than that of Europe or the U.S.,” says Mr. Chebotaryov. “In fact, the American influence around here has reduced a lot since they left Afghanistan.”

The newly elected Mr. Tokayev must navigate this troubled landscape as he unleashes his plans to modernize Kazakhstan through what he has described as sweeping constitutional changes to create a more inclusive and democratic country. It’s being watched very closely in Moscow.

“Wasn’t it [Alexis] de Tocqueville who said, ‘The most dangerous moment for any system is when it begins reforming itself’?” says Mr. Kortunov. “Kazakhstan is a very complex society, ethnically diverse, big regional differences, a lot of different clans. Any transition is bound to be unpredictable and difficult. Regional stability will be deeply impacted by how it proceeds. This election was just a beginning, not an end.”

Henry Nicholls/Reuters

Protesters demonstrate ahead of the World Cup outside the Qatari Embassy in London. Qatar outlaws LGBTQ relationships.

It’s the most widely watched sporting competition on the planet. Yet as the soccer World Cup kicks off this week in the Gulf Arab emirate of Qatar, the tournament is being denounced by critics as a triumph of “sportwashing” – using the glitter and glamor of high-profile sports events to launder a government’s denial of basic human freedoms.

That narrative may ring true over the next four weeks as hundreds of millions of fans worldwide turn their attention away from questions of human rights toward the fortunes of their own national teams.

But in the longer term, Qatar 2022 could well tell a different story.

That’s because the swirl of political controversy in the run-up to this year’s competition has provided the latest sign of an important change.

Sportswashing is getting harder to pull off.

It’s increasingly likely, instead, to attract worldwide attention to the very issues the host countries, and the governing bodies of international sports events, would prefer not to talk about.

The change has been coming slowly – too slowly for the human rights activists who have been at the forefront of a yearslong campaign to highlight the hypocrisy of sportswashing.

But it has been gathering momentum. A number of the national teams competing in Qatar, especially the Europeans, have brushed aside appeals from FIFA, the sport’s governing body, to avoid political questions and just “focus on the football.”

Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

Fans react during the match between the United States and Wales at Al Bidda Park in Doha, Qatar, on Nov. 21, 2022.

They have added their own voices of concern over Qatari restrictions on rights for women, LGBTQ people, and the immigrant laborers who have worked, and in some cases died, in the emirate’s $200 billion drive to build stadiums, roads, and a metro system for the World Cup.

The example of the last World Cup, held in 2018 in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, has given added force to this message.

Before that event, too, human rights activists raised objections. Four years before it kicked off, Moscow had seized control of two eastern provinces of Ukraine and annexed Crimea. At home, President Putin was cracking down on dissent and on the LGBTQ community. Just weeks before the tournament, he sent agents to poison a former Russian intelligence officer in Britain.

FIFA’s response at the time was to echo the message that Moscow had used in 2010 to win the 2018 hosting rights: The World Cup would help speed Russia’s post-Soviet evolution into a “different nation” that would be “brothers and sisters to the whole family of the world,” to quote the official presentation.

For Mr. Putin, the tournament was indeed a success, showcasing his and his country’s power, ambition, and international stature. The verdict of millions of visiting fans was almost uniformly glowing.

But it’s hard to imagine a more powerful vindication of those who opposed giving Russia the World Cup than Mr. Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.

Even before that invasion, FIFA had begun to show signs that it recognized the need to address sportswashing criticism of its award of consecutive World Cup finals to Russia and Qatar.

The year before the Moscow tournament, FIFA announced a formal commitment to internationally recognized human rights standards, and pledged to take human rights into account when choosing future host nations.

Natacha Pisarenko/AP/File

From left, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic at the World Cup awards ceremony after the final match in which France beat Croatia in July 2018. At this year's games, a number of national teams, especially European ones, have voiced concerns over Qatar's human rights record.

On the eve of the Moscow World Cup, FIFA applied the new approach for the first time. It raised specific human rights issues with the finalists vying to host the 2026 tournament, Morocco and the eventual victor, a joint-host bid involving the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

And the shift in emphasis has affected at least one aspect of Qatar’s politics as it embarked on its huge civil construction program: the treatment of the millions of immigrant laborers who make up nearly the entire workforce of the small, natural-gas-rich emirate. The Qataris abolished a system, known as kafala, which tied their work visas to a specific job, meaning they could not change jobs, nor leave the country, without their employers’ approval.

Qatar also issued a public assurance it would welcome all foreign fans, including LGBTQ visitors.

None of that, however, quelled mounting criticism in the weeks ahead of the tournament from rights groups, football teams, and fans’ organizations abroad, nor pressure for more changes in the treatment of foreign workers and the end of legal curbs on rights for women and LGBTQ people.

The Qataris were upset by what they viewed as double standards. They complained that the criticism surrounding their hosting of the 2022 World Cup, the first to be held in an Arab or Muslim country, had been far harsher than anything directed at Russia in 2018.

On that point, they’re right.

But the lesson of Qatar’s World Cup is that this may not be a result of double standards.

It is because the standards themselves have begun to change.

Cheyenne Cohen/AP

Sweet potato pie is more familiar to people who grew up in the American South than pumpkin pie. Sweet potatoes are also central to Black Southern cuisine; they’re tied up in the history of the slave trade, the yam, and plantation cooks.

If you grew up in the northern United States, it’s likely you associate pumpkin pie with Thanksgiving. But travel south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and another orange-colored pie reigns supreme on the holiday table – sweet potato pie.

Historically, pumpkins don’t grow well in the Southern heat. But that’s not the only reason for the absence of pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving was originally perceived as a holiday forced on the South by the victorious North after the Civil War. The arrival of pumpkins was just another pie in the face.

There’s more to the story. Sweet potatoes are also central to Black Southern cuisine; they’re tied up in the history of the slave trade, the yam, and plantation cooks. 

Maia Harrell, who grew up in Georgia, is a self-described pie nerd. She started working in a pie shop in high school, studied the history of Black women and pie-making in graduate school, and then launched her own business, Lord of the Pies. 

Today, she makes more than 100 pies a week and sells them at farmers markets around Atlanta. Ms. Harrell, whose family traditions lean more toward cake, didn’t even have her first piece of pumpkin pie until she worked in the pie shop. She found it bland. 

“I was raised with ... ‘Black folk don’t eat pumpkin pie’ kind of thing,” she says. “If it’s an orange pie, it’s always sweet potato.”

But something unexpected has been happening when she sets slices of pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie side by side on her table at the farmers markets. 

“A lot of Black people would come up to me ... [and say] ‘I know my Black card is going to be revoked, but I prefer pumpkin over sweet potato,’” says Ms. Harrell.

Even more surprising, she says, are her white customers who have never seen a sweet potato pie before. “I got a lot of questions like ... ‘Is it sweet?’ ‘Is it savory?’ I’ve never had to explain to somebody what a sweet potato pie is!” Without fail, she adds, they grew up in the North. 

Ms. Harrell sees a culinary challenge in making pumpkin pie more palatable. Earlier this fall she tried something new. She used a golden chai tea blend from a local vendor that has spicy notes from turmeric and black pepper. She set out a few samples recently and her customers gobbled them up.

“Next year, that might just be the pumpkin pie that I make from now on,” she says. That’s in addition to her sweet potato pie, of course, which, with its hints of citrus, sweetness, and caramelized depth, needs no improvement.

Thanksgiving 1958: It was grand. The house smelled like real butter – we were a margarine family the rest of the year – and the whole family was together. Usually it was just my folks, my sister Bobbie, and me, but this day David and Margaret, who were old enough to be living on their own, were home too. That meant fun, and love, and raucous laughter. Especially because of Margaret.

Margaret was an event.

At that point, I was the only person smaller than she was. Margaret didn’t top out anywhere near 5 feet, due to polio as much as parentage. All I knew was that she was completely packed full of joy and hilarity, and she could detonate at any time. Bobbie and I had dibs on the wishbone from the turkey, but with everyone around one table, we couldn’t come up with anything else to wish for. 

I’m all grown up now, sort of. Real butter is bubbling in the pan. My husband is mincing garlic for it, and I’m pouting like a child.

“I wish I could find the discipline to practice piano every day like I did when I was taking lessons,” I whine, as though that were an impossible thing. “I need a routine.”

“Tell you what,” Dave says, flipping the butter and garlic in a neat parabola. “Why don’t you sit down to play every night while I’m cooking your dinner?”

Two thoughts spring to mind. One, that would totally work. Two, I might be the most fortunate person in the world. An alliance developed between Schumann and garlic frying in butter. It is the smell and soundtrack of rapture. It’s no great thing that I feel gratitude a dozen times a day. It would disgrace me if I didn’t. 

Grace has billowed over me my whole life, none of it earned. It’s not that I don’t deserve it. It’s that no one ever does – that’s not how it works.

I should be able to learn the entire Schumann canon in the leisure given to me by a respectable pension from the United States Postal Service. There are those who would say that I earned that time with my 32 years in a postal uniform. In a small, unimportant way, I did. But the world is full of people who have worked harder and done greater things who don’t enjoy the particular freedom I do. I have been blessed.

My sister Margaret, though, lived with daily challenges and struggled to remain hopeful. She knew an abundance of hardship and friendship, never failing to find the flecks of gold in her pan of black sand.

She brimmed with gratitude! She was on fire with it. Gratitude is not fickle. It’s as wide as the world and as deep as we make it. 

Margaret’s signature phrase always made us laugh: “This changed my life!” she’d exult, and she might have been referring to a jar opener, a portable carrier for her oxygen tank, or a potato salad. Oh, we lined up 10 deep to help change her life, for the same reason flowers track the sun. That’s how much shine she had. 

But that’s the thing about shine. It doesn’t stay within its source; it gives itself away. Somehow, Margaret’s grace amplified our own. We yearned to be as wonderful as she already thought we were: She allowed us to bloom into our best selves. How about that? It turns out gratitude is a collaboration. 

There’s not a Thanksgiving Day that goes by that we aren’t grateful for the gift of Margaret’s memory. After all, it’s as good a day as any to give thanks. And that means – Margaret would be the first to point out – every other day is good for that, too.

AP

Ukrainian children and their mothers receive educational support at a facility in Warsaw, Poland, Nov. 9.

Close to 4% of people worldwide live in countries other than where they were born. That represents an unprecedented scale of human movement across borders and continents – enough to make up the fourth-largest country by population if banded together. Here is one migrant story you might not have heard.

In Poland, Turkey, and the Czech Republic, Ukrainians fleeing war have organized weekly events to clean the streets and public parks in the towns that have taken them in. These acts of gratitude are based on a Ukrainian custom of giving time freely to better the community. In some cities, locals have joined in and new friendships have been formed.

“By cleaning up the garbage, we want to say ‘thank you,’” Lena Bondarenko told Gazeta Wyborcza, a newspaper in the Polish town of Poznán. “Even in this symbolic way, we want to show the whole city of Poznán that we are grateful to you. I never imagined you could be so hospitable. My voice breaks.”

The currents of migration have at times stirred unease in societies that fear their norms and identities are being changed. But the arrival of foreigners is also forming eddies of hospitality and gratitude. In the United States, welcoming strangers is at the heart of the annual Thanksgiving holiday. In his Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1795, President George Washington urged his fellow citizens to pray that God would “render this country more and more a safe and propitious asylum for the unfortunate of other countries.”

That ideal was rooted in a conviction, echoed by presidents from then to now, that the nation ought to show gratitude for peace and prosperity through selfless devotion to the welfare of others. Our duty to God, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his 1907 Thanksgiving Proclamation, requires “the virtues that tell for gentleness and tenderness, for loving kindness and forbearance, one toward another.”

Gratitude for the skills that migrants bring may be causing a subtle shift in societies with deeply rooted definitions of national identity. In Germany, France, and Britain, according to a 2021 Pew survey, fewer people are insisting on traditional markers of belonging – such as ethnicity, being born in the country, being Christian, or speaking the national language. The study found that citizens are also “more likely to believe that migrants want to adopt [their] customs and ways of life.”

In the U.S., meanwhile, 78% of Americans approved of “allowing up to 100,000” Ukrainian refugees into the country after the Russian invasion. “This is the highest level of U.S. public support for admitting refugees that Gallup has found in its polling on various refugee situations since 1939,” the pollster noted.

For many Christians, this mix of hospitality and gratitude is not an end in itself. Writing to the Corinthians, Paul stated, “All things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God.” In a world being reshaped by people fleeing their homelands, new bonds of affection are being forged, creating a higher meaning of home as a spiritual belonging.