Thank you, Thanksgiving.

For as long as I've been in the advertising business, I've never gone gentle into the holidays. There always, no matter how on top of your work you try to be, seems to be a crush of loose ends or add-ons or crises that must be attended to.

I suppose getting ready for the end of the year is a little bit like getting ready for a two-week vacation. You can try all you like to be buttoned-up, but rattling along the Van Wyck on your way to JFK, you're bound to remember that you've forgotten your shaving cream, an electricity converter, or  your Azerbaijanian phrase book.

This year, as we head into Thanksgiving, there seem to be about a million and nine things that need to be done--and they all need to be done now. So, of course, as the days grow shorter, our nights grow longer and our sleep vanishes altogether.

That said, it's very nearly Thanksgiving, and despite the above, I have a lot to be thankful for.

My wife, my kids, my own self--seem to be surviving our modern dystopia with a modicum of personal success. That is, despite the meanness of the age, the unfairness of the economy, the inequities of the tax system, we all still have our faculties intact.

And even at work, where it seems we daily get shrill memos demanding that we eat the corporate-mandated swill from our corporately-mandated catering, or we get a note telling us the printers aren't working, or the wireless, or half the elevators, I work with a group of women and men who are--every single one of them--the sort of people you'd not mind sharing a metaphorical foxhole with, should the bullets, metaphorical or not, start to fly. 

The same, I say with sincerity, is true for my clients. They're demanding. But kind, and appreciative. And as Robert Frost once wrote somewhere, 'that has made all the difference.'

So that's it from me, pre-Thanksgiving. I'm taking the rest of the week off from blogging for the most-American of holidays.

Similarly, I wish you and yours many things to be thankful for.