I love our holidays.  My favorites are Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and these winter holidays.

Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s have a lot in common: feelings of gratitude, grace, good will, forgiveness, kindness, generosity, and LOVE. All shared with family, friends, neighbors, communities.

I love how we experience them.  Traveling, cooking (and dining!), singing, worshipping, partying.  Taking time to “be.” To count our blessings.  Sharing them.  Being compassionate, considerate, caring, empathetic.

Experiences like sitting near the fire on a winter day, the ground blanketed by fresh white snow.  A quiet stillness outside with sound absorbed by the soft snow, making the night silent.

Thinking about the Serenity Prayer…and praying for the wisdom to know the difference between what I can change, and the things to lay in God’s hands and let go.  Knowing He doesn’t want me to take them back after that.

They say our country is the most charitable.  Hard work, freedom, and good fortune grant most the opportunity to help folks who can’t work, aren’t free, or suffer misfortune.

Yankee ingenuity… driven by God’s gift of creativity, and powered by freedom, need, and opportunity grows the pie for us all.  Think Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose,” and his teaching that economic and political freedom go together, inseparably.  The pie is not fixed!  We grow it with our gift of creativity.

Human dignity… God created all of us in His image: shouldn’t THAT drive what I say to you, and how I treat you?

Our senses of humor… another gift God gave us.  I’m convinced He doesn’t want us to waste it!  Being fun and funny.  Being of “good humor.”

And, the greatest gift of all, the gift of LOVE.  The love my wife and I share, that we share with our kids, grandkids, family, friends, communities, and countries.

We as people have so much in common, it’s hard to understand why we would see things so differently at times.  Until we realize that’s also a gift.  Wouldn’t the world be strange, boring, gray, dull if we all thought the same?

We don’t!  That’s a grace of the human spirit.

This time of year, more than any other, seems we can and WANT to set aside our differences, and share feelings of peace, good will, and love.  I like that.  Hopefully, I can do that better in 2022 than in 2021!

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year!

– Ed