Beginning with President Lincoln’s official proclamation back in 1861, Thanksgiving Day has remained true to its essential founding principle. It’s all about gratitude. This being America, of course, how we choose to express that gratitude is, was and hopefully always will be completely up to us.

Nowadays we tend to gravitate towards shopping, eating and watching football, essentially a binge-consumption trifecta as uniquely American as roast turkey and DayGlo orange stretch pants.

Having reached that age where gaining a bit of extra blubber seems almost inevitable, my thoughts occasionally drift back to a time when I’d have been grateful for the chance to load on a few extra pounds.

Back in 1967, I was a stressed-out teenager bumbling through what would turn out to be an incredibly challenging adolescence. By age 16, having managed to get myself booted out of two previous high schools, I found myself more-or-less incarcerated at (cue the ominous organ music) “High School Number Three!”

Motivated by sheer terror and determined to reverse this downhill slide, I struggled to turn my academic career around. Then, as now, the only rule that everyone seemed to agree upon was: “Three strikes — you’re out.”

Although I had no idea what “you’re out” would look like, I wasn’t particularly anxious to find out.

“Getting along” in the boot camp-like environment of school number three required the following: You did what you were supposed to do when they told you to do it. Period. No questions asked.

This simple principle dominated every aspect campus life up to and including a rigorous program of compulsory athletics.

Compulsory? You heard me. Nobody bothered to ask which sport you wanted to play (none, thanks very much) or even which sport you might be any good at (see previous response). It was a whole lot simpler that way.

If they needed a warm body on the swim team, you were on the swim team. Period. It never would have occurred to the coach to ask whether a student knew how to swim. It was, quite literally a “sink or swim” proposition.

In my case, when a coach needed someone on the wrestling team, I was the perfect candidate. Not because I knew the anything about wrestling, you understand, nothing as subtle as all that.

The reason, the only reason I was drafted onto the wrestling team had nothing to do with skill. It had everything to do with my weight.

Weight? Who’s talking about weight? Maybe you figured I’d veered off on another rant. Nope. In fact I’m just now getting to my main point. I was on the wrestling team for exactly one reason.

At age 16, I was just under six feet four inches tall and weighed in at 191 pounds soaking wet. That provided everything my wrestling coach needed to know.

It was clear that my scrawny 191-pound frame was the only credential required. My weight alone meant I was qualified to wrestle in the “unlimited” division. Unlimited? Oh yeah!

Every other division featured upper and lower weight brackets. Lightweight was 110-119 lbs., middleweight, 149-161 and so forth. I’ve forgotten the actual numbers, but I’ll never forget that “heavyweight” topped out at 189 lbs.

If you tipped the scales at anything over 189 lbs. (191 for example) you’d be wrestling in “unlimited” a division with no upper weight limit!

It should come as no surprise that unlimited division wrestlers tended to be hulking 400-pound brutes who’d been wrestling since age three (presumably in the 90-101 lb. “junior behemoth” division).

Was I scared? Nope, I was terrified! But being slightly more afraid of expulsion, I suited up, showed up and prayed that things would end quickly, a prayer, which by the way was answered with miraculous regularity.

Eventually, even my brief wrestling career ended up teaching me a valuable lesson. I eventually discovered the reason coach put me in the unlimited division was that not fielding an “unlimited” wrestler would have cost the team a point.

Wrestling is so competitive that just one point can make the difference between winning and losing a match. That’s exactly what happened in the last fight of my career.

Once again, I’d been tossed around like a rag doll by some super-sized opponent. The only real difference between this match and the dozens of others I’d lost was that on this occasion the point I earned by simply showing up was the point we needed to win the match, a win, which came with a state championship banner!

The takeaway? Simply this: Life occasionally hands you the kind of challenge where just showing up for the event means you’ve won.