For many of us Thanksgiving is already a distant memory. The football games are over, the family has departed. Our only reminders may be a few leftovers in the refrigerator.

My personal philosophy is that we should be thankful continuously - not just on one day of the year. How can we use the skies above to remind us to be thankful for what we have? Here are just a few of literally hundreds of ways.

The sun is going to rise later, set earlier, and travel lower in the skies for the next month. This may make things gloomier here, but Down Under they are enjoying the warmth of summer. However, because of Earth's ideal tilt, as we go into the new year our daytimes will begin to get longer and the sun will be higher as we head towards spring. We can be thankful for a tilt that gives us this annual hope for spring and new life, and also allows most of the planet to get a nice distribution of seasons.

Every day the sun rises in the east and sets 10-14 hours later for us over in the west. It is because of our 24-hour spin that we have this. Shorter, faster days would give us very uncomfortable winds and weather. A slower spin of the planet means obnoxiously hot daytimes and freezing cold nighttimes. We can be daily thankful for this seemingly mundane phenomenon - the rising and setting of the sun every 24 hours.

The stars in the sky are beautiful to be sure, but we can nightly be thankful that they are where they are. Our starry neighborhood, those stars nearby, are mostly invisible to the naked eye and are almost all dull, boring stars, lacking in fiery excitement. Most of the stars we see at night are terrifyingly dangerous stars but are so far away they pose little to no threat. I can be thankful for boring, invisible, nonlethal neighbors every night I look up.

We can see the sun and moon every day and be grateful for them. The sun is the ideal size, distance, color, age, composition, type, and temperament for us to enjoy life on Earth. The moon is just the right distance and composition to stabilize our tilt and length of day. They are both godsends.

The very air we are immersed in is an ideal combination of gases found as of yet nowhere else. There are many causes for this wonderful mixture but one is that our planet is just the right mass, and thus has the just-right gravity to hold on to such a mix. I am grateful for all of that.

Daily life among humans can be tough, to be sure, but the physical creation surrounding us drowns us in an ocean of reasons to be thankful - not just one day of the year, but every day.

Until next time, clear skies!