A Glimpse of Thanksgiving Day & Being Thankful For Crude Oil

Today I am sitting at my dining room table on a rainy fall day, clicking away on my laptop, listening to the sound of the rain and wind. Our beautiful rustic chandelier is on gleaming beautiful rays of light to eliminate my key pad.

Since it is rainy, cold and wet outside, our children are in the playroom playing Wii Resort with Daddy. I hear them giggling and laughing those real belly laughs that give you tears in your eyes.

A Glimpse of Thanksgiving Day

Looking back to Thanksgiving day, our family of six dressed in our finest that Mommy washed and dried and climbed into our big seven seater SUV and drove to Grammas’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. There, we saw our family and enjoyed a beautiful turkey dinner with all the fixings. Gramma was up early putting her turkey in the oven and worked so hard preparing the meal. This dinner was made with love in Grammas’ kitchen using her tools, oven, stove, fridge, freezer, lights and her hands to name a few. The beautiful vegetables and turkey were all brought to our local grocery store by hardworking men/ women.

Once dinner was finished, we crowded around the sink and dishwasher cleaning up the empty plates. While the night sky started to darken, Papa started a warm fire in his wood fireplace and we snuggled around and laughed in the living room with the ambience of lamps eliminating the room. We all held a warm drink of choice in our hands that was brewed from our choice of machine. Once we enjoyed the pumpkin pie Great-Gramma brought us that was made with love, we all said good-bye and climbed back into our SUV.

Once home, we piled the kids into a hot shower and put them into warm clean PJ’s, snuggled them into their clean warm beds and told them how much we loved them and how thankful we were for today. We turned off the lights and sneak away.

Growing Our Economy

To be honest when I was asked to write on the topic of Canada’s oil and natural gas industry I felt like it would challenge my writing skills. The topic is not one that I naturally talk about, plus is something I felt I knew little about. Apparently I am not alone. A market research study suggested a large portion of the Canadian population didn’t know or care much about the oil and natural gas industry in Canada. However, it quickly came to me that this topic is one I should know about and one I need to share with my Canadian readers.

Economy – the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services.

The oil and gas industry in Canada is essential part of our quality of life in our community, as you read above our whole Thanksgiving Day was based around oil and natural gas. It affects us in our home, in our community, our province, our country. I was shocked to learn that the oil and natural gas industry makes payments to our governments that average $18 billion/year and goes towards hospitals, schools, roads, and social programs in our communities.

Since more than 550,000 people across Canada (direct & indirect) are employed by this industry, it is a huge part of Canada’s economy. I also learned that in 2013, over 2,000 companies supplied goods and/or services to the Oil Sands to construct and operate their projects, mines and upgrades.

I am embarrassed that I don’t know much about the stock exchange. This is a dark grey area of knowledge for me. However, I am told that the oil and natural gas industry makes up 20% of the value of Canada’s main stock exchange, the TSX. This is returned to investors and shareholders include pensions.

Outlining our Thanksgiving dinner was a perfect way to share how crude oil personally affects my family today. However, it is important to our everyday from our first wake, to our drift to dreamland. From the bowl of cereal we enjoy at breakfast, to the bowl of popcorn we share over a family movie. It is there when we need to see a doctor or sending our kids on the school bus. Crude oil is all around us, today and everyday. It supports us in more ways than I noticed before writing this post.

How would you get to Thanksgiving dinner if there was no gas to power public transportation or vehicles? There is no horse and buggy in my garage.

Intrigued to learn more about Crude Oil?

For more information about the Oil Sands industry visit oilsandstoday.ca 

Thank you for reading In R Dream! 

This post was brought to you by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers via  sheblogs. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.