The holiday season has begun and with the lights twinkling brightly and the spices swirling deliciously and the carols echoing beautifully... I'm happy.
  I'm happy that we have even the smallest of things.  It's so easy to take for granted the warmth of a heater, fuzzy socks, sweatshirts or hot chocolate...the peace of going to your own church to listen to tales of Christmas, of having time on the weekend to watch Hallmark movies with friends, of hearing the sound of music dancing through the frosty air.  I'm grateful that I have a house big enough to fit our lovely Christmas tree and our traditional nutcrackers and storybooks and collected set of Nativity scenes.  For the electricity to spark life in the lights. For all this delicious food that's going to make me gain weight sooner or later.  Although sometimes I whine about it, not all people are privileged enough to have a school to stress about finals in.  And maybe a winter cold isn't the most fun thing, but at least we have modern medicine to prevent the illness from becoming dangerous.
  Sometimes I get concerned about how much I have to be grateful-- why is it that I was born into a loving family with a nice home and an uplifting church and a well-ranked school and an over-abundance of food?  What did all those other people do make them have to face starvation or disabilities or discrimination or deaths of loved ones while I get to sit here, tapping away at my own person laptop computer?  If they were born into these circumstances, then it pretty much just makes life sound like a giant lottery {obviously it's not, but you get my point}that I HAPPENED to get lucky with-- and since life's not fair, I can't keep winning.  Will one day, when I'm least expecting it and completely taking advantage of everything, I lose what I've got?  Everyone has to have a trial in their life, so wouldn't it only be fair if after living so many years of blessing after blessing, I got struck down hard?
  I'm not trying to be negative or expectant of some horrible future.  But imagine if you were fighting with someone close to you and, in the heat of the moment, said some cruel thing you didn't really mean-- right before they got in a fatal wreck.  What if, I don't know, an explosion caused you to go deaf before you could memorize every song or soak up the sound of your BF/GF saying "I love you!"? Or you went blind before you could capture every sight, or lost the use of a hand, or your house foreclosed, or your government went psychotic and proclaimed tyranny?   
  We have so much.  So this holiday season-- no, forever-- I want to be grateful.