I have long felt that the those of us who play on church and chapel carillons really needed some appropriate music to play around the observance of America's Thanksgiving holiday. I undertook arranging four hymns that focus on harvest, the bounty of the earth, and giving thanks to God. Most of those melodies are also associated with other texts. There are various key changes and other transitions leading from one hymn to the next. Throughout this piece, I made a point of varying the harmonizations and the accompaniment figurations considerably, so that as one progresses from one hymn to the next, each section offers something fresh. I used vertical dotted lines to show where one might end one hymn, and start the next, the idea being that any or all of these hymn arrangements may be played individually, or perhaps in a different order (without the modulations between them, of course). The entire work is written with a light three-octave carillon in mind, but the player is encouraged to take some sections up an octave if desired, and to make other adaptations to larger carillons. (Assuredly, I do the same with these as well as other people's arrangements!)

—John Gouwens