When we color the holidays, Christmas is spruce green and cranberry red. Easter is stained-glass purple and daffodil yellow. Independence Day is firecracker red, white and blue. But Thanksgiving is the loneliest crayon in the box: ordinary old-shoe brown.

It's the grocery-bag brown of stubborn oak leaves that shiver and cling to bony branches.

It's the deep mahogany brown of a lake of gravy in a volcano of mashed potatoes.

It's the varnished coppery brown of a baked turkey, the gooey khaki of stuffing and the church-pew tan of homemade pumpkin pie. Even the football they kick around all day on TV is as brown as an Army blanket.

Other holidays are more religious, more patriotic, more commercial and more colorful. Even Halloween has a better marketing gimmick: Dress the kids like freaks and send them out to panhandle for candy.

Thanksgiving has no costumes, presents or Hallmark cards: "Happy Thanksgiving - Eat until you bloat and snore on the couch.''

No, Thanksgiving is more modest.

It is a day set aside since the founding of our nation, for all of us to pause and honor that historic American tradition: unabashed gluttony.

In a nation obsessed with diets, where women worship starving magazine models and men torture themselves on Torquemada workout contraptions, trying to look like comic book action heroes, it's amazing such a holiday even survives.

By now, you'd think the busybodies and do-gooders would have forced the FDA to glue on a label: "Caution, one average serving of Thanksgiving has more calories than a 50-gallon drum of hot fudge, enough starch to put pleats in a Jell-O salad and more fat than two William Howard Tafts and a half-Gleason.''

But somehow, the holiday remains unspoiled, faithful to the basic model first introduced when a handful of Pilgrims bowed their heads in prayers of gratitude for a few kernels of desiccated corn and a scrap of scrawny wild turkey.

Now that is Thanksgiving.

Today, we're almost drowning in our abundance. I couldn't live like a Pilgrim any more than my Triscuit-addicted Labrador could survive in a pack of coyotes.

But somewhere, lodged deep in the animal part of our brains, we can still dimly remember those dark seasons of hunger and aching worry about the looming winter. So, like migrating birds each year at the end of November, we feel the irresistible pull of instinct to go home again and hug the people we love most.

Our little extended families today can hardly reach far enough to pass the cranberry relish to one of those old farm families of the past. But we jam the highways and airports like birds on a telephone wire, answering that silent signal that sends us all flying home.

And when we feel that electric current of love as we hold hands to pray together, we rediscover what the Pilgrims learned so long ago.

We are closest to God when we admit we need each other. We find strength when we acknowledge our own weakness.

We like to think we have it all. But without our faith and our family, all of it is nothing.

Maybe this is the most American of all holidays because all that eating is only a side dish. The main course is family, with a healthy serving of Pilgrim humility - the color of Thanksgiving.

E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.