She’d gone to bed fully prepared: coffee maker programmed for 4:45, purse and coat neatly by the door, alarm set for 5:00. She doubted that she’d need it, but it was always best to be sure. After all, it would be a disaster if she slept in. As she lay waiting to fall asleep, she ran through her plan one more time: put the coffee in the coffee mug, drive to Walmart, line up. Once she finally got inside, it would be first things first. The Sony Xbox was the priority, then the memory cards, the Christmas decorations and the photo-quality printer paper. Her heart fluttered in her chest. She’d need to be fast if she was going to get her share before things ran out. Or –she swallowed, mouth dry in the darkness – or if things got really desperate, she could use the pepper spray. It was in her purse: she’d carried it ever since that fright from the man in the parking lot in 2009. She didn’t want to use it, but she needed the Xbox. She deserved it. She’d missed out last year because some rough man with a red face had pushed her out of the way, and she’d watched him triumphantly carry off the last one as she picked herself up off the floor. She’d been lucky she hadn’t been trampled! And the year before, she’d missed out on a flat screen TV when a whole family had surrounded the shelf, loading up on them and stopping anyone else from getting near. She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t going to let that happen again. This time she was ready for whatever came her way. OK. The above is the stuff of Sunday-afternoon fantasy. But how is one to make sense of the fact that an as-yet-unidentified woman pepper sprayed other shoppers at a Walmart in Los Angeles this week while trying to take advantage of the “Black Friday” sales? It’s possible, I suppose, that she crowds simply made her panic, and she loosed the pepper spray to get some breathing room…and then just happened to use the opening to spirit away an Xbox. But violence at the sales elsewhere in the States suggests that, though extreme, the pepper spray incident was part and parcel of an “anything it takes” attitude towards securing one’s deals.

For a self-confessed non-shopper of a Canadian who spent Friday working, driving my children back and forth to school and making tomato soup, the Black Friday mayhem is all a bit of a mystery. After hearing about it on the news, I first wondered if the mob scenes were representative of a sort of odd collective effervescence, but, although people can be heard to be laughing in some of the video footage available online, they do not seem to be acting with a collective mind. It’s actually kind of the opposite: it’s highly individualist, with just a whole lot of people desperately trying to do their own thing, and to grab their own deal.

While I’m not proud of it, my first reaction was a sort of smug, “Tut, tut…look how greedy and foolish those people are.” But if you look at the shoppers’ faces, they’re just ordinary people, not some caricature specimens of homo greedus. They have a day off. They want to prepare for Christmas. It’s fun –usually - to participate in a shared event. It feels fabulous to score a deal.

In fact, if you think about it, the shoppers are acting in a perfectly rational way considering the world in which we live. It’s one in which an extraordinary amount of human creativity is devoted to fetishizing desire in the form of marketing. In which wanting and buying are hailed as civic virtues. In which shopping is billed as “fun”. In which the over-riding message is that it’s what you have rather than what you do that makes life worth living.

The poignant thing for me, and I dare say many other observers, is that Black Friday is part of American Thanksgiving. My perception of American Thanksgiving is that it’s the most widely-shared holiday, a time to gather, feast, perform family rituals…and yes, to give thanks. Giving thanks for what you have seems far away from pepper spraying or trampling people to get more stuff, even if you intend to gift that stuff onwards. This is not said in a spirit of sanctimoniousness; it’s just an observation on the irony of it all.

After the euphoria of the deal…what next? I suppose the delight of seeing a happy face as someone unwraps their X-box on Christmas morning, and knowing that you earned that delight through your Black Friday efforts. But I can’t help wondering whether the pepper spray would be likelier to stay in the purse if we valorized gratitude to the same degree we did acquisition, and if we put our creativity and passion to use, not to whip up desire, but for thanks.

I was thinking how this could play out. What if the Friday after Thanksgiving was used for a different kind of thanksgiving, where you thought of something in your life that made it special, and devoted your thanks to it? It could be music. It could be the beating heart in your child’s chest. It could be your little garden. It could be your library. What if you gave thanks by giving that thing time and attention, or helped others to have something of the same? What feelings would that create? How long would that last? How could you make it a gift?

Every long weekend is good, and spectacular weather is great, but the two put together are a gift. We just celebrated Thanksgiving here in Canada. Those of us lucky enough to live in Toronto had three days of brilliant sunshine and highs of 25˚ Celsius. On the holiday Monday, my family and I took one of the tiny ferries to Ward Island in Lake Ontario. The Toronto Islands are only a ten minute ride from downtown Toronto, but they feel a world apart. There are paths all along the water, playgrounds, playing fields, picnic sites and parks. Moored yachts glow in anticipation of future sails. There are virtually no cars allowed on the islands, so we ambled contentedly in a Venice-like quiet, half-dazed by the good fortune of warm weather, time and such a lovely place to enjoy them both. Strangers smiled at us and we smiled back.

We ate a picnic on the boardwalk, "feasting" (Jamie's word) on walnuts and new season Macintosh apples. Then we went to the beach itself, where brave hearts were actually swimming. In October! We rolled up our trousers and waded in. We collected rocks for Jamie’s growing collection. We did a terrible job of trying to teach our Mira how to long- jump in the sand, laughing at our own ineptitude and relishing what would undoubtedly be the last feel of warm sand under our feet for the season.

The day was a gift and I was grateful for it. This gratitude would no doubt win the approval of a growing coterie of thinkers and writers who tell us that we ought to “practice gratitude” as part of creating a happy and meaningful life. (In the not so very distant past, of course, this practice was more or less built into culture through organized religion and community rituals, like Thanksgiving itself. Now, it seems, we’re left to our own devices to figure it out.) And yet, while these writers’ hearts might be in the right place, in fact I think much of the writing about gratitude is banal. It conceptualizes gratitude as a sort of generalized thankfulness for stuff and fails to spell out what it actually demands of us.

But gratitude does demand something of us, and it’s in meeting those demands that its power to uplift and create meaning is fulfilled.

First, gratitude asks that we see the special – even sacred - moments of existence as gifts, as Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly discuss in All Things Shining. In other words, our extra day, warm weather, and access to the Toronto Islands weren’t just nice little bonuses, they were specific gifts for which to be grateful. Sure they were products of calendars, meteorological phenomena and public policy, but they added up to something rare and special, and they created a memory for us to keep.

Gratitude also demands that we recognize and accept gifts when they come to us. After all, we perceive a person who overlooks a gift we give them, or who returns it for something else as at least a little ungrateful. Friends made comic hay out of this with Ross’s devastation upon learning (at Thanksgiving no less) that Rachel has exchanged a gift he gave her for store credit, leading to this exchange:

Rachel: Ross, could you pass me the yams? Ross: Sure. Oh, and Joey's got the mashed potatoes if you want to exchange them.

Rachel’s behaviour is so funny because we all get how obnoxious it is to give a gift and have someone not appreciate it. But how many times do we overlook subtle gifts that present themselves? The sunny day, the storm of autumn leaves fluttering down, the found hour to read, the cake that’s risen perfectly, the person who lets you in when traffic is heavy, the good sleep, the perfect cup of coffee, the written letter from a friend: do we accept these as gifts, or barely note them in passing? Theoretically, recognizing and accepting gifts would ask that we all slow down a bit, but that’s not exactly realistic for me, and I doubt it is for anyone else out there. But we all can cultivate a kind of attentiveness and readiness to action that means that we accept them when they come.

And here’s a thornier part of gratitude: gratitude implies that we are grateful to someone or something. Gifts come from somewhere. So where does one direct that gratitude? When someone writes you a letter, it’s straightforward: you direct gratitude at the sender. However, when the gift is a sunny day, it gets a bit trickier. Some will say they direct their gratitude to “the universe”, but I frankly have no way of conceptualizing the universe that makes it realistic for me to thank it for a warm autumn day. Those of us who have a system of faith have a readymade answer: God, or perhaps the gods. But if you do not have faith in a divinity that gives gifts, it may be enough simply to acknowledge that a gift has come from somewhere. Conceding, even celebrating, that there might be an agent of origin outside of ourselves, even if it simply lies in the nature of the thing itself, deepens our relationship with the gift. We are blessed, not just lucky.

And this is ultimately the point. People give gifts for three reasons: to establish and deepen relationships, to create webs of obligation and to mark occasions. It’s through these dimensions, not just “feeling grateful”, that our gratitude for the gifts we receive adds meaning and fulfilment to our lives. Gratitude helps us to deepen our relationship to the giver and even to the gift itself, to feel a sense of obligation in return for receiving the gift, and to recognize and mark a special moment in time that stands out from the rush of everyday life.

So accept gifts. See them when they’re offered, enjoy them, celebrate their nature and their role in your life, and think about what they bind you to.