By TOM GARRISON
© 2025 Tom Garrison

Each November. I compose a “Thanksgiving Thankful List” for the preceding year. My wife, Deb, and I enjoy our life in red rock southern Utah and have many things for which we are thankful.

I hope sharing them brings a smile and acknowledgement that even the seldom thought of can be a source of thankfulness.

Below is my 2025 list.

1. Southwest Utah has grown enormously in the last 15 years. Because of that I’m thankful for street signs. I’m an old guy and getting around is hard enough. Without street signs to guide me, I’d probably end up in the twilight zone.
2. I’m thankful for neon lights. The glowing, often curved shapes forming letters or pictures, tubes are pretty and quite different from incandescent lights. Neon lighting consists of brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that create assorted colors depending upon the gas filling the tube or bulb. Neon glows orange, hydrogen purple-red, Mercury blue, and there are others. Without neon lights Las Vegas would be a veritable wasteland—a few hundred people huddled around a desert oasis.
3. I’m thankful for spam/scam calls. Last year I included in my Thanksgiving Thankful List the ability to block calls. Due to call blocking, we now receive fewer spam/scam calls. Probably because we receive so few, I now enjoy them. After listening to their spiel, almost always in heavily accented English, for a few seconds I always ask how they sleep at night. Usually, my question is met with silence. I then ask how they can try to scam and steal money (or personal information) from an unknown person and sleep well at night. I ask if scamming people is what their parents taught them. Then I follow up with, “Why don’t you get a legitimate job that provides real goods and/or services instead of trying to scam people?” By then 100% of them have hung up. I am happy to be able to do my small part in making scammers/spammers feel guilty about their nefarious activity.
4. Let’s hear it for genetic/DNA research. Through genetic testing it has been determined that domestic cats share 95.6% of their genetic code with tigers, the biggest and perhaps most fearsome of the world’s big cats. It’s not surprising when looking at their similarities. Both tigers and domestic cats are great stealthy hunters, both are independent and generally live solitary lives (neither tigers nor cats naturally live in groups), both have intense curiosity, and both are beautiful. I’m thankful our cute furry family members, Bob and Willa, are basically little tigers. Big ones might be hard to handle.
5. I’m thankful for spoons. It would be difficult to eat soup or peas or ice cream with a fork—messy and slow.
6. I’m grateful for colors. Without colors many things would not exist, at least not in the form with which we are familiar. If the color orange did not exist, and you asked someone to hand you an orange you might end up with a rubber ball, a round rock, or a tomato. Who knows? And what about stop signs and stop lights? Imagine the chaos if colors did not exist. In addition, it would be a boring world. How did people in black and white movies survive?
7. I’m thankful for high clearance, 4 wheel drive vehicles. We own two. Deb and I are serious desert rats. (I have written five hiking books.) In the last 40 years or so we have hiked more than 250 different trails in the southwest (California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah). Some were waaay out in the middle of nowhere and reaching the trailhead required travel over crappy dirt roads. A regular sedan would not have made it.
8. We have 19 indoor plants for which I’m thankful–spider plants, various varieties of philodendron, lilies, and others. Besides being aesthetically pleasing they remove carbon dioxide (and other indoor air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and benzene) from the air and produce oxygen. They also add humidity to the indoor environment, a good thing when the summer humidity in southwest Utah is often a single digit. The best part of having a bunch of indoor plants around the house is that it lets me feel that I’m enjoying nature while being a couch potato.

I hope everyone recalls the many things, obvious and not so obvious, to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

About Tom Garrison:

An avid hiker for more than 40 years, Tom’s latest book, Hiking Southwest Utah and Adjacent Areas, Volume Four was published in September 2024. In addition to writing five hiking books, Tom has written four non-hiking books and has had more than 170 published articles since moving to Utah in 2009. Email: tomgarrison98@yahoo.com.