My Christmas Thoughts

If you see me this holiday season and I look a little dewy-eyed, it’s not the alcohol, but the countless reasons that I have to be grateful for this year. As I look back at the trying times that my family and I have experienced this year, I’m sure that you would understand.

We go through life down our various paths, not thinking for a moment on what can be around the corner or what we will wake up to one morning. Such a thing happened to me in one February morning this year. I found myself, along with many others, facing unemployment in an unstable economy and not sure what fate had in store for me and my family.

Severance pay would only last so long and then what? It’s times like this when you find out what you’re made of and who your true friends are. It’s amazing to see the support and compassion that comes to the surface.

I can’t even begin to name all of those that lent a helping hand. That helping hand showed itself in many forms of support. The many opportunities that helped provide firewood for our woodstove this season and those that stopped by to help us split and stack it. The many opportunities that led me to driving all over the Greater Toronto Area to help people beautify their yards by doing stump grinding, while at the same time I was earning a little supplement grocery or utility money. To the many professional acquaintances that lent support by creating interview opportunities that eventually led to re-employment.

For all of this, I am extremely grateful, but it doesn’t stop there. I still have some acquaintances that are still struggling to find employment and this worries me. Something that has occurred to me since the events of the past year is that it has I have developed a personal mantra, “Every day is a new opportunity.”

What is that opportunity? I don’t know. But everyday some thing shows up.

I have been thinking about writing this all day long as I ran some last minute errands. My gratitude goes out to those that had to deal with the worst retail day of the year, the store employees themselves. They had to wait until 5 or 6 p.m. just to rush home to a Christmas Eve dinner and the continue that rush to tidy up any last minute details that were put to the end of the day because they had to work.

As I sit here writing this, the effects of the Rolo martini cocktails are a short memory away, the dinner dishes are done, the left-overs are in the frig and the kids are trying to sleep, anxiously awaiting Santa to come and bestow his Christmas magic.

I realize that I have been truly blessed this year. I can only hope that you have been also.

Merry Christmas.