TOMORROW is my favorite day of the year, even though my wife and I will be bone-tired by early evening. We will have entertained 28 family members for dinner: sisters, daughters, brothers-in law, sons-in-law, nieces, nephews, grandchildren and whoever else tags along.

As I grow older I realize how much more I have to be thankful for. I start with the fact that both sets of my grandparents emigrated to the United States from Russia. I wonder how different my life would be if I had grown up there.

I am thankful that I was raised by parents who loved and cared for me. Even though they divorced when I was 10, they made sure I was not the victim of their differences.

I am thankful that I have been married to the same woman for 40 years (hopefully, she is, too). I was 22, she 21 when we married. How is it that I made such a good decision at such a young age? And today, with presumably much more wisdom and experience, how can I still make some lousy choices?

I am thankful that I have met many wonderful and interesting people over the years. I am humbled by many of these people who are trying to make a difference in the quality of life in our city.

Helen Gym is one. A mother of three, she is a founder of the citywide parent collective, Parents United for Public Education (www.parentsunited.org). She and her compatriots have created quite a dustup recently over the bloated Philadelphia Parking Authority's failure to provide monies to the School District of Philadelphia.

Feisty and persistent, Helen is often referred to as an advocate, but I prefer the term public citizen. Public citizens like Helen fully participate in our democracy. They help to define collectively who we are.

I admire these public citizens and am thankful that I've met many of them and, in some cases, worked with them. Take Jane Golden, who runs the city's Mural Arts Program. (www.muralarts.org).

She exudes vision, passion and optimism, and I am spellbound every time I hear her talk.

While she is far better-known, many people in government are often dismissed as bureaucrats but deserve our thanks for their commitment to the public they serve.

I am thankful for Sister Mary Scullion, who has dedicated her life to the homeless. We as a city are so much better off for her efforts (www.projecthome.org). When I am in her company, I often think it is the closest to heaven I will get.

A couple of years ago, I met Mary O'Brien, who has 19 years' experience in the field of public health with an emphasis on violence-prevention. She was so upset at the epidemic of violence in the city that she left academia and started an organization called A Better Philadelphia (www.abetterphiladelphia.org); its mission is to end youth violence by creating collaboration among leaders, no easy task.

Soft-spoken and steadfastly optimistic, Mary continues to build the organization - whose board I serve on - one brick at a time.

And I am thankful for the dedicated people I have met whose commitment I share about ridding ourselves of illegal handguns. It is a group as diverse as Joe Davis, a gunshot victim who has been bound to a wheelchair for 25 years, to the philanthropist Lynn Honickman, who recently started Moms Against Guns (www.momsagainstguns.org).

Recently, I met Michael Campbell and his legal team from the Pennsylvania Health Law Project (www.phlp.org). They field 3,500 calls a year from people who have problems accessing our inequitable health-care system. That same week, I met Susan Teegen-Case, who heads the nonprofit Arts and Spirituality Center (www.artsandspirituality.org). It relies on spirituality and creative expression to empower and transform communities. And I also visited with Mary Seton Corboy, who is committed to sustainability with her urban farm project in the middle of Fishtown (www.greengrows.org).

If I weren't confined by space, my list would go on and on. We are a city rich with individuals and organizations whose emphasis is on making a difference in people's lives rather than just making a buck.

To all of them, I say thank you and Happy Thanksgiving.