Grandma gives the child a cookie.

“What do you say?” the parents ask. Often, a small child will get mixed up and say something else instead, like please, or bye-bye, but eventually he or she gets it down.

I was taught to say my prayers at night. I can remember praying, sometimes kneeling beside my bed, sometimes drifting off to sleep under the covers, as I earnestly thanked God for a long list of family members, friends, possessions and pets that I particularly valued and felt lucky to have.

I would say that most of us were brought up to say thank you in one way or another, and we should be glad that the habit of expressing gratitude was instilled in us early. According to conventional wisdom, gratitude is good for us mentally, spiritually and physically, as heart healthy as oatmeal.

We were also taught that we should be grateful for the oatmeal growing cold and congealing in our bowls at the breakfast table. Plenty of children around the world would be happy to have it. Fine, we muttered mutinously, send it to them. Causing our elders, no doubt, to recall the pronouncement of Shakespeare’s King Lear, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” or words to that effect.

Many people devote the month of November to enumerating their blessings, sometimes sharing on social media, sometimes journaling privately.

Studies at the University of California have indicated that a predisposition for positive personality traits like optimism may be genetic, involving hormones including serotonin and oxytocin. We all know people who were just naturally born more content and laid back than others. Many parents can testify to this, having produced both so-called “easy” babies and “fussy” babies.

According to Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School, optimists enjoy better health outcomes than do pessimists — at least according to their own reports. Since optimists are more likely than pessimists to give positive reports, we should take that with a grain of salt. Only a grain, though. Remember your blood pressure.

Even if we are born with our own innate negative tendencies, such as fearfulness, antipathy, pessimism and outrage, we can still cultivate feelings of thankfulness that will calm us down and make us happier. People have known this since ancient times.

The Bible’s Old and New Testaments exhort the precept of thankfulness, as in Psalms 100:4, “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, into his courts with praise …”

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about cultivating the habit and practice of gratitude — and smiling. The accumulation of possessions or power does not lead to greater happiness, because the more you gain, the more you want.

There are some who take issue with contentment, however, because they say it gets in the way of setting and reaching goals. Anxiety, they maintain, is a mobilizer. If you go around feeling and expressing gratitude all the time, making daily entries in your journal about what you are thankful for, according to this thinking, you will lack the incentive to marshal your forces to improve your life. Instead, you will become complacent and lackadaisical, and as a result, you will never accomplish anything worthwhile.

While I see their point, I know that too much anxiety can be paralyzing. As clinical psychologist and researcher Lisa Miller wrote in an article for New York Magazine, “If the Nineties were the decade of Prozac, all hollow-eyed and depressed, then this is the era of Xanax, all jumpy and edgy and short of breath.”

In an article for Forbes Magazine, psychotherapist and author Amy Morin detailed seven scientifically proven benefits of thankfulness, including psychological and physical health, better sleep and more friends.

You don’t have to be so thankful that you never make any improvements. Look at the Pilgrims, who invented Thanksgiving. They threw a big feast to celebrate the fact that, basically, they hadn’t starved or frozen to death that first year in the New World. It was, after all, pretty much touch and go, and many of their group had died. Thankfulness didn’t hold them back from making further progress; if they had decided at that point to just lie back and rest on their laurels they would all have perished the following winter.

Nothing wrong with looking at what you’re thankful for and celebrating.

What do you say?

Happy Thanksgiving.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the News for more than 20 years.)