While I was visiting a friend last Saturday morning, members of a neighborhood church came by to give him a frozen turkey. Every year, right before Thanksgiving, the church goes door-to-door, giving away turkeys in the neighborhood.

But it's never made him feel guilty enough to visit the church. He's been going to another one for the past 20 years. It will take more than a turkey to get him to change pews now, especially if his wife has anything to say about it.

"Did you give the turkey back?" my friend's wife asked in a voice that sounded weary from asking the same question every year.

"Uh, no," my friend answered poorly, justifying his turkey avarice by blaming the smiling, shiny church family for fervently pushing the bird on him. He promised to re-donate the turkey through his own church's hunger drive.

I told my friend that even though the turkey drop provided him an annual moral dilemma, the act was still a blessing. No one drops off turkeys in my neighborhood, just unwanted dogs and cats.

That's too bad, really. I've come to find out I need an annual reminder of the Thanksgiving holiday. For years, I thought I had somehow dozed off between the 50 percent off Halloween sale and black Friday, and missed it. It calmed my fears about having early onset of Alzheimer's disease by knowing that all the retail stores forgot Thanksgiving, too.

Store displays now look like the set from "The Nightmare Before Christmas." Skeletons, tombstones and Freddy Krueger masks sit on aisle caps alongside candy canes, wreaths and inflatable Santa Clauses.

Nowhere do you find any hint of Thanksgiving. I figured some crusading group working to put Thanksgiving back in retail ads would have sprung up by now. Especially since we have so many religious cartels complaining about how we took Christ out of the annual greed and holiday shopping binge season we call Christmas.

I miss Thanksgiving. I know there's still a Thanksgiving season tucked there, somewhere between Halloween and Christmas. There's still parades, football games and houses filled with family and the smell of turkey and pumpkin pie somewhere. They still show "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" every year.

Most of all, we should not forget tomorrow as a time to give thanks. It's a time to give thanks for the harvest we reaped from all our labors and blessings bestowed upon us.

One of the blessings of this job is being constantly made aware of how thankful I should be. From being a news reporter, I know people who have lost their homes to floods and fires and could fit all their belongings into the back seat of a car.

I know a mother who will have Thanksgiving for her two young daughters this year for the first time without their father. He was killed in a construction accident a few weeks ago.

I know a man who calls a pup tent on the river banks home. His alcoholism and mental illness wears out his welcome everywhere else he goes.

I know children who lived in basements of abandoned homes, left there by parents who loved drugs more than they did them.

Tomorrow I will work Thanksgiving Day and visit food kitchens with people thankful just to have a hot meal. Black Friday means nothing to someone where every day seems dark.

Even if we forget Thanksgiving, let's not forget to give thanks.

Alonzo Weston can be reached

at alonzow@npgco.com.