I look around at the colored garlands of light that are strung on bushes and wound around trees and I hear the old familiar melodies emanating from loud speakers mounted on light poles and I echo the words of a popular song “So this is Christmas”
At night I walk the streets of my hometown admiring the houses that are decorated for Christmas and wondering about the ones that have no decorations at all.
I’m one of those folks who tends to go a bit overboard for this season. I spend hours hauling out from storage my collections of angels, of santa's, of small artificial trees wound with Christmas lights. I bring out the dolls and the teddy bears. I do all of this the day after Thanksgiving and I do it to please nobody but myself. Sometimes I get visitors and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I spend the holidays alone but I don’t mind at all.
Christmas music alone is enough to banish any twinge of loneliness. Its not the job of others to make me happy. Happiness is the gift I give myself and the quickest and surest path to happiness is the constant practice of gratitude. When we make the practice of gratitude a consistent element of our every day lives it becomes quickly apparent that we have far more to be grateful for than we do things to complain about.
And so I celebrate the season with an abiding sense of gratitude and a string of colored lights to banish the darkness.
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