If you won’t give thanks to God for all the goodness he bestows on you, you’ll seek goodness and blessing elsewhere, in created things. You will become a worshiper of idols. Little, then, could be more important in life than cultivating gratitude and thankfulness to God for his many blessings, the blessings of salvation and of constant earthly provision. As such, the death of Thanksgiving is not an auspicious sign.

I was driving around where I live a few days after Halloween and noticed something: people had gone straight from Halloween yard decorations to Christmas ones. No one has put things up to celebrate Thanksgiving. I filed this observation away in the back of my mind and didn’t think much more about it until I went online to shop for some household items on a major retailer’s website. There, prominently displayed before you see anything else on the site, was a special “Halloween Store” and a “Christmas Store.” Thanksgiving was nowhere to be found. Thanksgiving, indeed, seems increasingly to be dying out as a meaningful American holiday.

What might account for this? Could it be that a holiday centered on giving thanks to God has fallen out of favor in a society obsessed with self and with material pleasures? Halloween, especially the celebration of the demented and depraved, has become much an increasingly prominent celebration, as Christmas becomes ever more focused on materialistic indulgence, and therefore more and more central to our lives for that very reason. The way these holidays are celebrated seems to match the ever more post-Christian ethos of our society. Thankfulness, which requires a God to be thankful to, does not fit the zeitgeist.

But thankfulness is at the very heart of the Christian faith. The Psalms, the songbook written to form the various range of expressions of Israel’s piety, is full of exhortations to God’s people to give thanks to him. Psalm 95 (vv. 1–2), which opens exhorting God’s people to give thanks to him, is instructive:

Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!

The Psalm then warns God’s people not to harden their hearts as Israel did in their wilderness wandering (vv. 8–11), thereby falling under God’s judgment and not entering the land of promise.

What was the nature of Israel’s sin? They grumbled against God because they were infecting by discontentment at God’s hard providence in bringing them into the land of promise through the difficulties and trials in the wilderness. Grumbling, at its core, is driven by a refusal to give thanks to God, no matter the circumstances. The author of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews applies Psalm 95 to his own readers, thus warning them (and us) of the perennial danger of grumbling against God when our lives do not turn out exactly as we had hoped.

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