Opinion

What will you say on Thursday? What will cross your heart and your lips and spill out from your soul onto the dinner table like so much runaway gravy?

Thanksgiving is the day when more of us express their truest, innermost feelings more openly and freely than at any other time of the year.

We may express surprise and elation at Christmas, love on Valentine’s Day, reverence on Easter and respect on a parental day, but Thanksgiving…well, isn’t it built on our best emotions?

They gathered there, at midfield of a football stadium, before more than 100,000 witnesses. They joined hands, oversized men in black, white and red. Their loyalties and potential animosity had been deposited on their sidelines.

Their heads were bowed, and they were praying.

We love the holiday season and all that it represents. We are glad so many in our county embrace that season and present many wonderful opportunities to celebrate. But we have a suggestion:

The Celebration of Lights is celebrated too early.

This community festival, the county’s largest, is a wonderful event to bring the public to downtown Shelbyville, to erect the city’s Christmas tree and to light up the season.

But we think its scheduling nearly two weeks before Thanksgiving is out of perspective.

From A to Z, or perhaps Antiques to Zebrafish, you can find gifts in Shelby County for nearly everyone on your holiday shopping list. A wide variety of items that are sure to please and surprise a friend or relative are yours for the looking.

And the looking is just part of the fun of shopping Shelby County businesses.

Unique gifts can be found in businesses housed in intimate historical downtown buildings as well as large modern businesses that have sprung up throughout the county.

Veterans Day took on a new meaning for me a few years ago.

As a child of the Vietnam Era, I admired and feared for those who took up arms for our country, but being a timid little country boy, I shamefully admit that I wasn’t real keen on participating.

Perhaps admiration and guilt combine to form my odd interest in fiction and films about World War II, maybe they are  why I’ve read The Winds of War/War & Remembrance six times and watched the miniseries of the latter nearly that many times.

When I think of “oozing, bothersome blemishes,” I get a bit nauseous. Is this “bothersome blemish” referring to the folks that hire undocumented workers? I doubt it. Rather, I believe that the reference is aimed at the workers themselves. The people who since the mid-1990s have come to Kentucky, harvested crops, worked with horses, helped keep prices down and worked for very low wages in dangerous conditions for long hours.

That was a double dose of good news last week for the so-called City Centre project that would bring a much-needed enhancement to downtown Shelbyville, a theater/conference center project to be built on the block surrounding the Shelby County Community Theatre.

This is the inspired brainchild of educator Leon Mooneyhan, who has been working methodically with a small group of partners to pull together all the plans and funding needed for such a facility.

And now he has received two early Christmas gifts.

Here’s the first thing I recall from watching a World Series: In 1961, the Yankees were manhandling the Cincinnati Reds in five games, although I can’t recite details, not the heroes or the records or even the elation I must have felt when it was over.

I just remember that my man Mickey Mantle didn’t play because he had an oozing sore on his hindquarters. They called it an abscess, which to a third-grader sounded like recess but otherwise meant nothing. I just knew that Mickey was hurting and that was a bummer, so to speak.

It makes sense that the horse industry would bring Shelby County serious recognition in the big-time international sports arena.

On Sunday in Mexico, Hannah Sue Burnett, formerly of Finchville, staked a claim to a spot in the 2012 U.S. Olympics by winning a silver medal in eventing at the Pan American Games.

Ms. Burnett, who was no worse than third aboard Harbour Pilot throughout the 3-day competition, also was the highest-ranking scorer on the gold-medal-winning U.S. team.