Long day today — up early to run the annual Turkey Trot (5-mile run) at 9:30 a.m. (brrrr….it’s supposed to be 39 degrees when the run starts).

After the race, we’ll load up and hit the road to visit my wife’s parents in The Woodlands (about a 3 hr drive). We’ll stay the night with them tonight, and then head over to my parent’s house in Liberty (about 50 miles east of The Woodlands) tomorrow morning for a second Turkey Day.

We’ll stay and watch the Texas Longhorns destroy the Aggies, then make the 4+ hour drive back home.

I hope all of you have a great holiday weekend filled with family, food, and football!

Some things I’m especially thankful for this year:

• Our brave soldiers serving at home and around the world
• My wonderful wife

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UPDATE — (while I’m waiting on my wife to finish getting ready after the race, so we can get on the road, and so that I can get some turkey in my belly)…

Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard points us to President Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation from October 3, 1863.

Read if you never have. Re-read it if it’s been a while. It’s an important reminder of the Christian values on which not only this holiday, but this nation were founded on:

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

I hear a lot of people say how much they love that Thanksgiving is not a secular holiday — but they’re wrong. Thanksgiving is a religious holiday.

And even though I’m an agnostic, I have a deep respect and appreciation for the values and principals of Christianity that have shaped our nation.

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UPDATE II — A quick glance at my referral log shows that quite a few people are Googling “Thanksgiving Day dinner in Austin”.  If you’re looking for a place that’s open and serving a traditional dinner, my top recommendation would be Katz Deli at 6th and Rio Grande (downtown).

Tell Marc I sent you.