Dear official bird of gratitude,

As you may know, the season of expressing gratitude and stuffing our faces is upon us again. Some of The Concerned are Canadian and gave thanks last month, but the rest of us have a lot to be thankful for this year. We won't bore you with a huge list of small things we're grateful for (like a declining statewide gonorrhea rate, extension cords with built-in indicator lights, and so on). But we want to let you know we deeply appreciate a few major things your benevolent gobble helped sing into existence over the past year.

Foremost, thanks for keeping the price of oil so stable and so high this year. Alaska depends a great deal on oil revenue, and when prices are low, things get a lot tougher. State agencies, localities, even high-end restaurants and lobster importers seem to suffer, or at least get really antsy. When oil prices are low, lots of tough choices start presenting themselves to Alaskans. But it's just easier not to think about all that stuff. So thanks for your role in making sure world petroleum markets keep working in favor of Alaska's primary industry.

That said, we're hoping you can figure out a way to keep high oil prices from seriously hitting the wallets of Alaskans trying to heat their homes and drive their vehicles. When prices are high, it's awesome and lame all at the same time for Alaskans -- sort of like we imagine being a turkey and the mascot of Thanksgiving must be for you.

And speaking of petroleum, we're not sure whether or not to be thankful for Gov. Sean Parnell's recent measured shift toward a liquefied natural gas pipeline to bring North Slope gas to market -- and, who knows, maybe to Alaskans, too. The governor mentioned that market forces seem to be looking more favorable for LNG export to Asia than for a big, traditional gas line to Canada and the increasingly shale-gas saturated Lower 48 market. But still we The Concerned feel like we should thank you for something when it comes to natural gas. We are thankful that Alaska still has a lot of it, even if it doesn't seem to be going anywhere quickly. Maybe we should thank you for making the market align with the will of voters who created the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority by ballot initiative in 2002? There's so much uncertainty when planning huge projects, it is sort of gratifying to see things line up now and then.

When things turn out terribly, we're grateful to know that the fine folks at Ripley's Believe it or Not recognized Alaska's own "Buddy the Wonder Dog" this year for his talent for fetching Troopers. We're even more grateful that Buddy is still out there, vigilant and able to tell warn us all when something big is going wrong. We're a little disappointed his skills only seem to apply to workshop fires, not natural gas projects, but still, we The Concerned feel lucky to have him.

We're extremely grateful to you for keeping the damage and loss of life relatively low when the Bering Sea "Brrricane" struck Western Alaska earlier this month. Although the damage was more than minor in some places, sea walls and tidal breaks held all along the coast. And only one person was reported to have died from the massive storm.

We're also very glad that this year's early cold snap and dramatic onset of winter across much of Alaska shows that global warming doesn't exist anymore. All those scientists should have known all along that simply letting greenhouse gasses reach a new high concentration would help Alaska have a serious winter again, finally. Because, as most of Alaska knows, subzero cold in November is a lot less terrifying than an early winter breakup or barely any snow by New Year's Day.