Hymns of harvest and gratitude

When I lived in Chicago, I had a church music position. We always did a Thanksgiving Eve service, which I've come to miss. It tended to function largely as a hymn sing, with a bunch of songs focused on gratitude.

It's a bit odd in our present-day culture that, in our Christian hymnody, the themes of gratitude and harvest tend to be weaved together. The sad truth is that this connection means a lot less to most people now than it did years ago. "Come You Thankful People, Come," "We Gather Together," "Great is Thy Faithfulness," "Praise and Thanskgiving"...to mitigate this oddness, I tended to choose also general-use hymns such as "Now Thank We All Our God" and "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing."

I can think of few things that would do more for our collective spirituality (not to mention our local economies and the natural world) than a general reconnection with ideas of gratitude and harvest and the relationship between the two. Personally, perhaps a more immediate goal will be to write some music for worship that somehow resonates with contemporary experiences of trying to treat food with more reverence, mindfulness, and gratitude.

Hope you're enjoying your food-coma Friday as much as I'm enjoying mine. Happy Thanksgiving.