Given that our daughter has to work on Thanksgiving day, we’re having a little early holiday dinner today so we can have some feasting and gratitude time together.

And that just goes to show you that you can stuff yourself and be thankful any old day of the year, whether it’s the official turkey gobble-gobble day on the last Thursday in November or not.

The ability to have a gratitude attitude also would apply to those days that don’t seem to be starting off so hot either.

Last Sunday morning comes to mind as one example.

Better Half and I were doing our usual scurry off to early church, getting ready to hop in the car, and head ’em up, move ’em out, when the touchy subject of chicken noodle soup surfaced.

Can you imagine getting angry at your spouse about chicken noodle soup on your way to God’s house first thing on a Sunday morning?

Lord have mercy!! (Note two exclamation points here — one for my soul, the other for his.)

Well, long story short, we were getting all snarly faced and hissy-fit at each other, like two alley cats poised to scratch it out, all this over how best to load up and later transport to Urban Mission Ministries what we figured would be more than 500 cans of chicken noodle soup.

I could see my attitude and his quickly digressing during this “discussion,” rapidly going south and sour when he announced: I don’t want to talk about this now, Janice.

Using my name like that in a sentence runs parallel to parents using your first and middle name to summon you.

To this I responded, in my well practiced role as marital diplomat, in my very best Mrs. Doubtfire voice, “Now let’s not make today a bad day right from the get-go, children.”

We looked at each other and laughed, in the garage, in the car, on the way to church.

Isn’t laughter a wonderful gift to be thankful for any time of year?

Better Half and I can’t stay mad at each other for very long or God forbid, we’d have no one to talk to but ourselves.

I appreciate funny stuff, including, for example, a very appropriate post I saw on Facebook, the author anonymous but a thought that resonates with all our appetites. It read: “Don’t forget to turn your bathroom scales back 15 pounds Wednesday at 1 a.m. for Thanksgiving.”

I laughed to myself in the grocery store checkout line the other day as I unloaded my buggy with no sense of order at all.

I plunked everything down on the conveyor belt as quickly as I could.

Then I remembered my mother, how she would cluster and categorize everything she was buying.

If she had 10 cans of chicken noodle soup, she’d dig through her buggy and group them all together for cash register processing.

I laughed.

The cashier probably thought I was goofy but I was was just having a mom/chicken noodle soup moment.

Happy Thanksgiving — go heavy on the food and save room for some laughs.

(Kiaski, a resident of Richmond, is a staff columnist and community editor for the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times. She can be contacted atjkiaski@heraldstaronline.com.)