Thanksgiving Day and Snowboarding

We’re in the Thanksgiving Day holiday weekend, which of course brings various expressions of gratitude, some of them relating to snowboarding.

I was reading one snowboarding blog where, if I recall, the author said something like “I give thanks to snowboarding.” That doesn’t strike me as quite right, or at least complete. You can enjoy an activity, appreciate a tradition, and so forth, but you thank a person.

In this case, the person is God, who in the words of the world’s most widely distributed (and perhaps the most widely read) book, “created the heavens and the earth.” Unless you’re a hard-core materialist, the beauty of the alpine environment in its best element–the glistening snow, the bluebird sky, the (to borrow from the national hymn) “purple mountains’ majesty”–evoke some remembrance of the divine.