Now don’t get me wrong, I really do love the holidays, but that love seems to get a lot more like starting a cold engine each year. Once Halloween hits, it’s a parade of seasons. I start by strategically placing ceramic jack-o-lanterns on my dining room table, then I turn them around to serve double-duty as harvest pumpkins for Thanksgiving. The day after Thanksgiving, I pack all the brown and rust and maroon colored items away and pull out the holiday wreath and little Italian lights. Because our apartment is so small, we can’t fit a Christmas tree inside, so we put it on the front porch. It might be a bit Clampett-esque, but we like it.

And each year, I find myself feeling a bit more pressured to get in the spirit as I place my sentimental trinkets around the house. (I have a collection of misfit dime-store Santas that is something to behold. Let me just summarize by saying they have to have something wrong with them, and they have to look odd. If it’s a double-take odd, all the better.) I know that I’m not unique. A lot of us resist the “play on demand” attitude of even the best intentions of the seasons: thankfulness, cheer, anticipation. I’m not going to blame it on the economy, though, of course, it’s not helping. This battle of snap-my-fingers cheer against creeping malaise has been going on for years.

But this year to not be thankful and heartened – even in the face of the world’s challenges – would just be stubbornness. When push comes to shove (and I’m not talking about the holiday sales), it really is about what endures versus what is lost.

• Every time I think about Grant Park on November 4, 2008, I feel a swell of Chicago pride, and I get a little weepy. The last time change tried to exert its force in that park, the whole world watched with breath held in fear and disbelief. Forty years later, the world saw not only a change in our government, but a change on our streets and, hopefully, in our hearts.

• Every time I think about the images from around the world at the news of our newly elected president, I am humbled. Our use of muscle over the last seven years has turned many lasting allies into skeptical associates. The celebrations in streets from England to Kenya and beyond seemed like the windfall offer of a second chance to me. Now, we need to earn it.

• I’m thankful that Reginald Gibbons and Patricia Smith were both nominated for the National Book Award. Reg is a founding board member of the Guild Complex. His generosity of spirit is legendary. As editor of TriQuarterly for 17 years and of the preponderance of Tia Chucha Press books while they were published at the Guild, Reg helped bring forward some of the most important voices of our time including Aleksandar Hemon, Terrence Hayes and A. Van Jordan. And – as evidenced by his nomination for this very prestigious award, which is only one in a line of his very prestigious nominations and awards – he has produced an enviable body of his own work. Writers and poets by definition have to carve out a space – often a small one – for their work while doing all the other things they have to do to pay the bills. Reg has not only done it all, but he’s done it with grace and integrity and unwavering excellence. He is truly a role model for how to make an impact in literature. You can read for yourself what a great guy he is in an interview at http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2008_p_gibbons.html

• A star of the national SLAM for years, Patricia Smith has shown how to meet the challenges and keep going time after time. She has mastered not only the stage but the page. Tia Chucha Press published her book Life According to Motown in 1991. Back in the day, she was one of those voices “missing” from the cultural conversation as defined by the Guild Complex mission, but today she is internationally recognized as a voice with which to be contended. Patricia Smith's interview can be found here: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2008_p_smith.interv.html

• I’m thankful for the Guild Complex – and not just because it employs me. I hung around the Guild long before I started working here, and I will hang around it long after I decide it’s time to leave this job. Why? Because the Guild consistently presents voices that I can’t find anywhere else. As I listened to the commentators marvel at all the different kinds of people getting along in Grant Park on November 4, I thought, “Well, that’s just like a giant Guild Complex event.” You don’t often get a chance to draw your paycheck from a place that feeds your heart. I’m lucky.

• And, I’m thankful for all the people who have offered their talent, their guidance, their elbow grease and their passion to me in the last year. Truth be told, there is no way that any words can adequately express my awe and deep appreciation. So, I’ll offer a simple, “You rock.”

From the board, volunteers, and staff of the Guild Complex, we thank you for being a part of our family – because that’s how we think about you here. We might not buy you socks and underwear – like my mother still does – for the holidays, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not on our list of what endures…and we are so thankful.

Wishing us all peace in 2009,

Ellen Placey Wadey

Executive Director, Guild Complex.