A/N: Just really felt like I couldn't let Thanksgiving go by without a Winchester tribute! This is mildly spoilery through Season 11, I guess? But not overly.
Ten Things Sam Winchester is Thankful For
Dean. Even though his brother sings off-key in the shower, steals Sam's socks, irons Sam's shirts with beer, cracks dirty jokes when they're in the grocery store—despite all of it, Sam's just grateful that they're by each other's sides again and always. He likes when it feels like always.
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Salad. Because dammit if life on the road doesn't make burger after burger after burger seem downright repulsive. Kansas may not be California, but Sam's found a few farmer's markets, and there's nothing more refreshing than a lush bunch of spinach, a ripe tomato, a tangy vinaigrette. Even if all such ingredients necessarily bear Dean's mockery.
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The way his brother's breathing evens out when he sleeps, the only thing that can calm Sam's ever-frazzled nerves and tell him that he's safe in all the ratty motel rooms they've stayed in, past and present. (He hates that about the Bunker, that they sleep in separate rooms. Dean thought he'd be thrilled to have your own space, princess, and he pretends he is. But.)
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The leg-room he has in the Impala. It's still not quite enough, but that's Sam's own sasquatch fault, and he knows it. The Impala comes closer to feeling like home than anything else, the only thing Sam never believed he grew out of completely.
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Cas, Jody, Garth—the friends they still have living. And Bobby, and Ellen, and Jo, and Charlie, and Dad—all the ones they lost. Sam arranges pictures in his mind like some kind of mental photo album, and he thinks that sometimes gratitude for what's been loved and lost hurts, but it's gratitude all the same.
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Jess. Even if he still can't think of her without his throat closing up. (He was going to propose on Thanksgiving.)
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The constant onslaught of technological improvement, because Sam hasn't forgotten what it's like to cradle a cinderblock of a phone on his shoulder while scribbling notes based on mimeograph records. Smartphones are proof that God exists, even if Sam's still not sure that he looks like Chuck.
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Books. If Sam makes it to eighty years old, which, most days, does not seem likely, he doesn't think that he'll ever be anything but mesmerized by words on the page—the dusty tomes and the intimately tattered paperbacks, mysteries and myths, hopes and dreams. For so much of his life, his near-closest friends.
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Forgiveness. (Because it's the only thing that you can give when you yourself don't really deserve it.)
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Dean. And the way Dean loves him, the way Dean will always move heaven and hell and earth for Sam when push comes to shove. It's not quite fair to be thankful for that, Sam knows, because Dean didn't ask to have Save Sam stamped into his DNA. But Sam is grateful. Sam is Dean's reason to live, and Dean is the only reason Sam is alive.
Note: I, of course, do not think that Sam is unworthy of forgiveness. It's a reference to something expressed by Jared recently about Sam's own headspace.