Our 'thankful' editorial - served up with a twist

If you’re a fan of Food Network, you know about the importance of balance. For every sweet ingredient, you need a salty one.

At Thanksgiving, we often find ourselves writing a sugary editorial about all the things we have to be thankful for here in Hinsdale. And thankful we are. But sometimes you get a taste for something a little salty. And so, today, we offer up our own “Thank You Notes,” inspired by the one and only Jimmy Fallon.

• Thank you, e-learning days in Hinsdale High School District 86, for ruining every snow day for students forever.

• Thank you, supporters of Laurel Haarlow, for electing her to the Hinsdale Village Board and astronomically increasing the percentage of women who serve on it.

• Thank you, property tax levies, for being discussed and filed in December, the month when people clearly have nothing else to think about.

• Thank you, sub-zero temperatures in January, for giving us the chance to use the phrase, “It’s warmer on Mars!”

• Thank you, Illinois Tollway Highway Authority, for agreeing to take the dirt excavated from the site of the new parking deck at Hinsdale Middle School and giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “dirty dealings.”

• Thank you, alliteration, for making our “Girls on the Gridiron” a catchy headline and not, as one Facebook post suggested, an anti-feminist characterization of a grown woman.

• Thank you, Hinsdale trustees, for agreeing to permanently extend the hours liquor is served on Blackout Wednesday, thereby eliminating pressure to be completely intoxicated by 10:30 p.m.

• Thank you, new Hinsdale Middle School, for looking absolutely nothing like your predecessor.

• Thank you, “physics first” science sequence in District 86, for going by the acronym PCB, which shares two letters with CBD, which we’re sure to be writing more about in 2020.

• Thank you, Jeannie Cella, for retiring after only 29 years at Wellness House. Had you stayed any longer, your shoes would have gone from hard to fill to impossible to fill.

• Thank you, people who call to tell us we got something wrong, for reminding us how passionate readers are about our newspaper.

• Thank you, microbreweries, for being located all around Hinsdale. Instead of visiting just one in the village, we were forced to visit nine — and try the various creations at each.

• Thank you, Bruce Law, for providing us with one of our favorite school board meeting moments of all time while you were in District 86. How often do you get to hear a superintendent and school board member argue about the proper translation of a Latin phrase?

• Thank you, parents of Hinsdale, for providing a seemingly endless supply of cute kids to appear on our cover.

• Thank you — in all seriousness this time — to all of our readers, advertisers, sources, columnists and reader advisory board members for an amazing 13 years of providing community journalism the way it was meant to be.