I’m like you. Staring at steaming piles of breathtaking food, trying not to scratch at my newest uncomfortable, autumn-colored sweater, wishing we didn’t have to do this little charade. The charade being: “Let’s all go around and say what we’re most thankful for!” Again. Can’t anyone write this stuff down so the next time anyone wonders they can just look up what I was most thankful for last year?

I don’t think I can put into words how uncomfortable this annual presentation makes me. It was easier when I was little because as soon as my turn came everyone was already giggling at the thought of what The Beany Guy (my now forbidden childhood/within-the-family nickname) might say he was thankful for. “The Yankees!” I’d shout to a room erupting in laughter, or, “My Playstation!” if I wanted to elicit laughs while earning points with my dad who paid for it.

That works as a little kid, but as you get older they begin to expect a bit more out of you when asked what you’re most thankful for. Little jokes stop making the cut around puberty and, after the laughs your first answer may induce, the faces around the table reconvene and stare even more intently, asking again: “Really though, what are you most thankful for?”

By the time I got too old to get by on jokes and ignorance to my own fortunes, I started actively hating this question. Actually, once I hit my teens, my family just stopped asking, opting instead for a few smiles, a pause in conversation and a toast before stuffing our faces with food, then watching the Lions again.

I shudder to think what holier-than-thou things I’d have said I was most thankful for if asked this question in high school. “Well, I’m most thankful for how we haven’t killed every child in the Middle East yet,” or, “I’m most thankful for (insert obscure charity) and all they do for our (choose up to three adjectives: hungry/sick/impoverished/imperialized/voiceless) world.” But, looking at these answers I developed as I got older, I see they actually don’t stray far from the answers I gave in childhood.

No matter what I say in response to this question, I always do my best to avoid really answering it.

I hid juvenile answers behind my own naïveté and — despite my increased vocabulary — I did the same when those asking wanted a serious answer out of me. Above all else, I wanted my answer to be impressive. If my answer didn’t make you laugh or find me smart, I supposed I hadn’t lampooned the Thanksgiving tradition well enough. See, as much as I liked to show off my willingness to wrestle with “big” questions, I had a few uncertainties I’d never let my mind explore.

Like the existence of God. I had my wealthy, liberal, West-Side-of-Manhattan hang-ups with believing in God like everyone else I knew, but I think one unspoken reason why I never wanted to know for certain whether or not He was real was so I could keep on conceiving of the world, and my place in it, as I always had. I wanted to keep hiding my head without having to worry about what it meant to really be thankful for something — something I had but did not deserve — like my life and my money and my friends and my family and my education and… well, I was fine with saying I was thankful for something stupid or ironic so I could just go ahead and start eating.

It’s just I could never stand people who spent so much time thanking God for their lives and awards and all that. I felt — even before I believed in God — that, if He is real, He’s got way more important things to do than sit and listen to some actor’s acceptance speech. And, really, why bring God into something as meaningless and “all about you” as winning an award? It didn’t add up to me.

“I want to thank our producers, my mom and dad, my wife and kids, the screenwriters — you guys rock — oh yeah, and The Being that may or may not take my life once I walk out of this theater.”

It always seemed to me that, if you really believed in something that powerful, wouldn’t you thank whatever had that kind of power first? I’m sure we’ve all got some amazing screenwriters to thank, but if you actually do believe that God gave you everything in your life, and made the universe, do you really need that long to think about what you’re thankful for?

I wish someone had told me that the question “What are you most thankful for?” is hard, and the hard is the point. The fact that it’s hard for you to answer is — ultimately — what you should be most thankful for.

Be thankful that you have so much to be thankful for that you actually find the question annoying. Be thankful that you dread it as it makes its way around to you every November. And be thankful for the family you have that dreads it too, but dives as unknowingly into the undeserved, bountiful blessings of the table, and of the lives that God provided for you even before you could thank Him.

Ben Verdi is a man with a Bible a laptop and a nasty curveball. He can be reached at jetboiz@aol.com