Thanksgiving Day is a special holiday in the United States and Canada. Families and friends     1     to eat and give thanks for their blessings.

Thanksgiving Day is really a harvest festival. This is why it     2     in late fall,   after the crops are harvested.

The first New England Thanksgiving did celebrate a rich     3     harvest. Early in the 16th century,   the     4     Pilgrims landed at what is now Plymouth,   Massachusetts. But in the first winter of their     5     they had a difficult time. They suffered a lot and many of the Pilgrims even     6     to death. It was in the next year that they     7     a good harvest. So Governor (州长) Bradford declared a three-day     8    . The Pilgrims invited Indian friends to join them for their special feast. Everyone brought food. Such is the     9     of Thanksgiving Day.

In time,   other colonies (殖民地) began to celebrate a day of thanksgiving. But it took years before Thanksgiving Day became a national     10    . During the Civil War,   President Abraham Lincoln announced the last Thursday of November 1863 as a day of thanksgiving. Today,   Americans celebrate this happy harvest festival on the fourth Thursday in November while Canadians, their neighbours, celebrate Thanksgiving Day on the second Monday in October.

Telling the bees

“London Bridge is down” is how Sir Edward Young, Queen’s private secretary, conveyed the official news about the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday. As the news spread through the world, a headline     1     many on social media: “royal beekeeper has informed the Queen’s bees that the Queen has died.”

Did bees need to be told about human affairs? Would they have any sort of opinion on the matter?

But some beekeepers,     2     by historians, say “telling the bees” is a standard practice that goes back centuries, with potentially serious consequences if not followed.

“It’s a very old and     3     tradition, but not something that’s very well-known,” said Mark Norman, a folklorist and the author of Telling the Bees and Other     4    : The Folklore of Rural Crafts.

The tradition holds that bees, as members of the family, should be informed of     5     life events in the family, especially births and deaths. Beekeepers would knock on each hive, deliver the news and possibly     6     the hive with a black cloth during a mourning period. The practice is more     7     known in Britain but is also found in the United States and other parts of Europe, Mr. Norman said.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, it was believed that neglecting to tell the bees could lead to various     8    , including their death or departure, or a failure to make honey. Nowadays, beekeepers may be less likely to believe they risk bad luck, but they may continue to follow the tradition as “a     9     of respect,” Mr. Norman said.

Stephen Fleming, a beekeeper for 25 years and the co-editor of BeeCraft, a magazine for British beekeepers, said he once     10     the tradition after a friend died. He went to the friend’s bees, gently knocked on the hives and told them the news, he said.

“It was just something I thought my friend would have enjoyed,” he added.

Mr. Fleming said most beekeepers would most likely be aware of the tradition, but not as many would practice it.

“It’s generally thought to be a good and nice thing to do,” he said.

Trips to my hometown of Boyertown in eastern Pennsylvania usually involve any or all of the following: really good hotdogs, ring sausage and perhaps, as a(n)     1     gift, chocolate the size of a football.

These are the tastes of my hometown, the foods that were part of my early childhood which later became the foods I     2     for whenever I go back to visit. They connect me to another time in my life, bringing back memories of whom I was with and what I was doing when eating it.

A recent trip back was no     3    . This time, however, I chose something I had not had in more than 25 years. There is a place in town called “The Grill Shop” that serves only breakfast and lunch. It has been around for as long as I can remember. It is the size of a shoebox (小平房), with five stools at the counter and a couple of booths along the wall. A flat-top grill is     4     into the front of the space and faces the street.

From that grill come the tastiest hotdogs, which were topped with chili, onions and mustard. They come wrapped in white paper and     5     into brown paper bags, the sturdiness (牢固) of which gets tested as the chili and mustard     6     seep out (渗出) before you can finish them.

It is the best $1.75 you will ever spend. I got two, because one is a lonely number. One bite in and I was ten years old again, going there with my grandmother during summer vacations. We would get hotdogs to go and take them back to her kitchen. My grandfather would sometimes come home for lunch.

Or, we would stay there if we were lucky enough to     7     a booth. A short lunch would     8     into an hour, since my grandmother knew almost everyone in town.

Mostly,     9     Boyertown looks much like it did when I lived there. I took a walk past my old house, which looks the same, although the abandoned factory had been replaced by a(n)     10     living facility and parking lots. The Grill Shop survives, however, and for that I am thankful.

Reasons for Taking a Gap Year

I decided to take a gap year between twelfth grade and university and it was one of the best decisions I’d ever made. Here are my top three reasons for taking a gap year, explained through stories of my own experiences:

To Gain Experience

For the first few months, I     1     wanted to get a job to earn some money as I wanted to go travelling later in the year. I went to several interviews and ended up landing a job at Lush in my nearest city. This was without    2     a great job for me as the role is extremely customer focused so that I was constantly talking to people. Working at Lush was great as it showed me what I was capable of and helped me to build so many    3     skills.

Get out of Your Comfort Zone

My three months working at Lush were tough but very rewarding. I look back on it now and feel so happy that I    4     it, not because I was able to buy the off-price items, but because I did something that, a month ago, I was saying I couldn’t do, and because I proved to myself that I could do it if I believed in myself and put enough    5     in.

Travel

This section should really be called “Get out of Your Comfort Zone Part II”. I first looked into lots of gap year travel agencies and eventually found that they were all    6    . Then I came across ICS, an organization funded by the government that sends young people overseas to make a difference in a developing country. This is where the comfort zone point comes back into play.

When I first found the website, I said to myself “I can’t do that as ICS programs would last three months — the longest I had ever been away from home. Anyway, I decided to go after I found that it was very affordable (90 percent government-funded), and it    7     changing the world for the better — something I had always wanted to do, so I applied. I got matched to a company called VSO and they placed me in Ghana.

For the first couple of weeks in Ghana, I was very homesick and cried every day. However, with the help of my teammates, I     8     with it. I am forever grateful to my friends from the UK and Ghana for supporting me all the way through. And it was amazing to see how the kids benefited from us-we worked in a local school to    9     what went wrong in their courses, help improve their educational quality, and get kids who had dropped out to come back to school.

At the end of the trip, I gave a young girl a pair of my shoes and the smile on her face was    10    . Knowing you have made a difference in someone’s life is the best feeling.