I want to give thanks. We’re going to spend time on Thanksgiving Day with family and we’ll meet some new friends.

We’re all tempted at this time of year to offer a word of thanks and gratitude for our many blessings. We are Americans. We live in a great country that provides us with liberty that others around the world only can imagine.

I want to give particular thanks for being a citizen of this country and for being able to do what I do daily. I criticize my government. I criticize my president; yes, he is my president, even though I didn’t vote for him and I detest the notion of this man taking up residence in the White House, which is my house.

This blog gives me a tremendous release to vent my frustration and, yes, my anger. I make no apology for any of it.

I suppose I should give thanks for my grandparents, all four of them. They had the courage, the fortitude and the intrepidity to venture from Greece and Turkey in the early 20th century. They settled in United States of America and produced a man and a woman who themselves would marry and produce — that’s right! — yours truly.

Therein lies the source of my gratitude. I am grateful in the extreme that my grandparents sought to leave all that they knew and set out for a new frontier in a new world, an ocean away. They had deep faith in themselves, in each other and in God to guide their way.

Two generations later, my sisters and I came of age. We reached out to pursue our own lives. I found a young woman with whom I fell in love. We married 47 years ago and produced two sons, who have grown into successful men; more importantly, they are good men.

Through it all, I was able to pursue a career in journalism that enabled me to express myself, to tell others’ stories and to chronicle the lives in communities where my family and I lived.

My country allowed me to do all this. I am grateful for my country. I fairly routinely give thanks regularly for the opportunity I was given. I believe truly that I could not have experienced the professional joy that I did had my grandparents chosen to leave their homeland for some other place.

This great country of ours has allowed me to continue to bitch and moan about the direction our government is heading. I choose to keep yapping about it and I do so with full confidence that I will be allowed to express my displeasure without recrimination.

I’ll forgo that bitching at least for the next day. I likely will choose to comment on other matters while we focus our attention on the family with whom we will gather on Thanksgiving Day.

With that, I wish you all a happy day. Give thanks in your own way for the liberty we all enjoy.