As you gather with friends and family for Thanksgiving, consider asking them - and yourself - this question: When was the last time you were aware of feeling grateful, and why were you feeling that way?

Don't let anybody get by with a one-word answer.

''My family,'' Nicki Garner said, when asked during a fundraising event earlier this month at the Four Points by Sheraton Hyannis Resort Cape Cod.

Pressed (albeit gently) to elaborate, she explained that Nov. 12 was her birthday. To celebrate, her mother, Dorothy LeMarbre, aunt Jean Curran and sister Joan LeMarbre joined Garner and her two daughters - Kelsie Krafton, 14, and Rachel Krafton, 13 - at the family's Falmouth home.

With her husband away, it was, Garner said, ''A real girls' weekend. We watched movies and cried and ate lots of chocolate and the adults drank wine.'' They made her a birthday dinner with salmon teriyaki and Kelsie's chocolate cake with strawberries. The morning brought a birthday breakfast and a stack of greeting cards.

''I couldn't stop thinking how lucky we were to have everyone there - two of my daughters' generation, two of mine and two of my mother's generation,'' Garner said, beaming as - in the telling - she replayed it all.

Across the aisle, Tracy Elise Botelho, also of Falmouth, said she remembered feeling grateful on a recent three-day business trip to California that she didn't have to worry about being away. Although she missed her husband and 2-year-old son, ''I was grateful being out there and knowing my son was in good hands with family and friends.'' In another part of the hotel, Oyster Room bartender Stephen Eddy thought about being grateful as he delivered sodas and salads to people in for an early lunch.

Eddy said Veterans Day always makes him think about people who served their country, especially those who were wounded or lost their lives. ''Those guys deserve our thank-you,'' said Eddy, a former Navy hospital corpsman.

Now a nursing student at Cape Cod Community College, he said he's grateful that this pursuit will keep him caring for people. ''It's nice to be appreciated. You don't have to hear the word 'thank you.' It's nice to be able to help people when they need it, because I've gotten help when I needed it.''

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Six years ago, a Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, and a webmaster from Serbia, Daniel Uvanovic, set up www.gratefulness.org.

The goal was to create an online community where people could read about grateful-living tenets Brother David espouses while sharing their own experiences.

''It's encouraging to see how visitors from all over the world catch on to the fact that grateful living unites people across ethnic and religious boundaries and gives a creative impetus to justice and peace,'' Brother David said in a prepared statement (he is now living in a hermitage, as is common to the Benedictine order he joined in 1953).

Now 80, Brother David has written six books on living gratefully and lectured around the world, interspersing that work with times of solitude, prayer and reflection. The Web site has allowed him to continue the grateful-living message with less traveling.

''It (the site) was set up on Thanksgiving of the year 2000, and it was relatively small in scale until 9/11. Then, we had more visits than we could handle. We had 600 entries within days,'' said Patricia Campbell Carlson, executive director of A Network for Grateful Living (ANG*L), the nonprofit group that operates gratefulness.org. The site now gets about 5,000 visitors a day.

''Spikes are often associated with tragic things that happen in the world, which seems a little convoluted until you think that it's a place where people can come together and share in a prayerful way,'' Carlson said last week in a telephone interview from her home office in Ithaca, N.Y.

She was quick to point out that prayer, in this context, is a quiet time for sharing and awareness rather than a religious practice.

Chris Wilson, president of ANG*L's board of directors, said, ''Gratefulness has a way of attracting people to spirituality on the basis of following their hearts. They end up living in a way that any of the religions would approve of.''

A Zen Buddhist for many years, Wilson said living gratefully tends to make people more aware of the environment and its needs, and more inclined toward peace, because those who are looking for reasons to be grateful don't feel like victims.

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People counting their blessings may find an improvement in their physical and mental health, according to a 1998-2000 study conducted by psychologists Michael McCollough of Southern Methodist University in Texas and Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis. The Research Project on Gratitude and Thanksgiving compared a group of people who kept daily records of good things that happened to them with a group that recorded disappointments and bad things.

''When people are grateful, they experience 'calm energy.' They feel more alert, alive, interested, enthusiastic. They also feel more connected to others. Why is this? Highly grateful people have a worldview in which everything they have and life itself is a gift,'' Emmons wrote in an e-mail interview.

He continued, ''Grateful people (are) less likely to experience envy, anger, resentment, regret and other unpleasant states that produce stress and thwart positive emotions. So whether things are going well or poorly, gratitude is an effective approach to life.''

Emmons said grateful living recruits positive emotions - like joy and hope - that have direct physical benefits, most likely through the immune or endocrine system.

Morgaine Beck, a life coach who formerly lived and worked in Washington, D.C., said slowing down her hectic life boosted her ability to be grateful. ''We moved to the village of Falmouth and we walk everywhere - to our dentist, our church, our grocery store,'' she said. ''Slowing down and being connected to where I am - seeing the beauty of the leaves and the people - it's such a different perspective than when I'm in my car.'' Beck said she recently noticed her neighbor's holly tree had a profusion of berries, whereas last year it had none. She found herself wondering if the neighbor had done something differently or if the tree's life cycle was a factor.

Wilson, the Zen Buddhist who's a lawyer in California, said ANG*L encourages people to act on the things they notice and are engaged by. The group's Web site has a globe covered with points of light; visitors can click and find three organizations in tune with their interests.

''If you're grateful, it's because you realize you're blessed and you should bless others,'' Wilson said. ''Blessing is a river. If it ends up in a place with no outlet, it becomes barren, a dead sea.''

On the Cape, former Barnstable High teacher Peter Dubay started a ''Thanks-for-Giving'' movement, which encouraged people to donate to their favorite charity on the day after Thanksgiving. Barnstable High and Cape Cod Community College students have, since 1998, held walkathons at Cape Cod Mall, raising money and awareness.

Dubay is now working in Waltham to establish a national Thanks-for-Giving Foundation to ''foster increased charitable giving and to encourage the use of philanthropy to teach the values of giving to our children.''

Wilson said developing the habit of giving back to the world and living gratefully sustains people in adversity, because they are accustomed to looking for the tiniest seeds of healing and renewal. ''No one is grateful for losing a loved one, but there is still hope. And that hope is gratefulness in waiting.''

(Published: November 20, 2006)