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When I was growing up, our family had Thanksgiving dinner either at home or at a relative’s home. It didn’t much matter where, the food was what mattered. The food was always good, and it was always the same. Oh, there might be a different pie now and then, if someone felt creative, but as long as the basics––pumpkin and pecan––were covered, it didn’t affect things much. I can say now, that the food was always the same, but at the time it never occurred to me that this was true. I never thought about it at all. This was Thanksgiving, it was very simple.

If I thought about other families at their Thanksgiving dinner, I assumed that they would be eating the same food I was. Even the Pilgrims undoubtedly had exactly the same menu at the first Thanksgiving as we had at our family dinner. I didn’t really think about it, somehow I just assumed that everyone did things the way my family did.

I was in my late twenties before I ever sat down at someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner. It was a horrible experience! The food was delicious, but it was just terribly wrong! The stuffing was wrong, the cranberry sauce was wrong, the corn had red pimentos––oh no!And for dessert––no pumpkin pie! I could have wept. I was brave, I was polite, I certainly didn’t starve, but the wrongness of it all was like a nightmare.

It wasn’t until much later that it dawned on me that this is what they ate every year! This was their traditional meal. It was just different than mine, not wrong. This is when I understood the Thanksgiving Dinner Principle. I call it that for obvious reasons!

People all over the world do things much differently than we do, imagine that! We just tend to assume that what we do is the normal thing and everyone else is wrong. Not just different––our immediate response to something different is a feeling of wrongness.

It isn’t just food. It is love, work, play, relationships, healing, grief, houses, pets, travel, children, music, religion and so much more. What seems obviously right to us, seems strangely wrong to someone else.

We unconsciously create and use a yardstick to measure behavior, both ours’ and others’. We might see others using their yardsticks too, and somehow we imagine that they are all the same. It isn’t until we put them next to each other that we begin to see that they are all different. This doesn’t mean that we all have to use the same yardstick. It just means that we can recognize that they aren’t all the same.

If we notice that our response to something different is to make it wrong, perhaps we could take some time out to look at our response. Something different might be interesting and we might learn something from it. We still can decide that it is wrong for us when we have more information, rather than rejecting it only because it is different. If we practice being less judgmental, our personal values are not threatened, we simply add to our knowledge and understanding of people around us.