Many Thanksgivings

We’ve already celebrated Thanksgiving in two different churches this year!  It’s a tradition here to have a thanksgiving service around the time of the harvest, where the whole church gets together for a feast and offers a sort of “first fruits” to God.  I thought these services would be a little more agriculturally oriented, but the only connection we got to see was the week beforehand there was a half-an-hour portion of the service devoted to deciding what amount of produce each family could bring for the big meal.

El Padre & Smile On giving an offering during a song that involved dancing
in the style of each of the different types of people who need to thank God
(this woman is doing the "European/American?" dance)

In the actual thanksgiving service there was a lot of focus on thanking God, and the different fellowship groups, whether women, youth, or children had a separate time to bring up gifts they were offering to God for use at the church (like brooms, food trays, cooking pots).  There were also many opportunities to dance up to the front and put offerings in the offering basket, besides the main time where each family was called up in groups.  Overall, people had so much fun giving their gifts, praising, dancing, playfully challenging each other to match gifts that had already been given, and slapping money on the foreheads of other singers/dancers which would then go into the offering.  We have some more reflections about the beauty and horror of this experience coming out in our next mailing, but I’ll just say here that I really appreciated the joy of the giving but didn’t appreciate how some things were painfully stretched out through the five hour service!