Reasons to be Thankful

Life.  Laughter.  Friends.  Warmth.  Music.  Banter.  Coffee.  Reasons to be thankful – and ten thousand besides…

The Dock has had a very thankful week.  Our Thanksgiving Day celebrations yesterday saw the whole Dock community – residents, students, tourists, builders, businesspeople, volunteers – join together to create a massive paper chain of Reasons to be Thankful.

Munching special thanksiving sandwiches and disgraceful amounts of Roses, Celebrations and Quality Street, we spent a hugely moving and powerful day remembering just how much we have to be thankful for – capping it all off with some fantastic acoustic tunes from the gang at the Belfast Met Christian Union to round off the evening.

And of course we’re still buzzing from the joy of celebrating The Dock’s third birthday – a birthday party held for the first time in ‘our place’.

On Day One, The Dock met in the open air and went for a walk:

For Birthday Party One, we hired a room in the Pump House Cafe:

For our second birthday, we used the empty concrete unit in which we’d been Meeting The Neighbours:

And for our third birthday… we gathered in Dock Cafe, fired up the heaters, ordered extra scones, filled the coffee machine, crashed on the sofas, gathered round the furnace… and partied our little socks off.  We showed some pictures of the progress of both the Titanic Quarter and The Dock over three incredible, eventful, unforgettable years.   I spoke (without a script – which I think meant that I just babbled I’m so thankful it’s so amazing thankyou thankyou thankyou… for about an hour).  We got out the guitars and keyboards (the Dock volunteers formed a band – provisionally called Dock Collective Experiment – for the evening), lifted our voices and thanked God with all our hearts and souls.

And then Tegan cut the cake which mum had baked – which, as always, perfectly captured the story of the Dock at each birthday.  For Year One – in which we brainstormed, caught the vision, and formed the Dock as a shared project, the cake was the new Dock logo:

For Year Two – in which we started Meet the Neighbours, began the Dock Walks, and went boat-hunting – the cake looked like this:

And for Year Three – in which The Dock found a home, opened a cafe, found itself at the centre of Life in the Titanic Quarter in Belfast’s Titanic year – three words summed it up:

We Are Open.  Thankyou.