The worthiness of a fuzzy blue blanket on a cold day...

Her elation was definitely disproportionate to the event, but it made me ponder.

It was cold, as most of you are keenly aware of right now. I was opening the door for Avriel to get into the car. "Yay, a blanket! I can be cozy!" she proclaims and happily jumps in the back seat of the car and wraps herself in the fuzzy blue blanket that had been camping out on the floorboard of our car.

I immediately thought, "What if we truly saw things like a child." I quickly discarded the idea of having the full range of emotions as a child as I imagined myself slamming doors and throwing myself headlong on the nearest soft surface and yelling "You don't love me anymore!" when my bedtime was enforced. Which let's be honest, if my bedtime was truly enforced I wouldn't be yelling, I'd be elated when I threw myself headlong onto my bed.

However an unexpected (but not fully necessary) blanket on a cold day...So simple, so ordinary, but still a blessing and deserving of a "Yay!"

Experts say that truly happy people have a practice of gratefulness daily. Not random, but practiced. Like my friend, Mark, who for years would write down something he was grateful for at the end of the day and read them at the year's end.

At the beginning of the school year I was reading a book about Sabbath, and it suggested starting our prayers with thankfulness and gratefulness and ending with "Oh, by the way can you take care of..." I tried it, it was extraordinary because it sized everything properly. It sized God and His power as huge, infinite, and worthy of lengthy prose. It sized my problems as minuscule, solvable, and worthy only of brief mention.

So as the holidays wind down, and we all enter the time of year that is not our favorite... (I'm just assuming that most of you have the same emotions about the uselessness of February that I do.)...Let us give proper lengthy thanks for the fuzzy blue blankets left on the floorboards of our cars...and fleeting thought to the annoying uselessness of the month of February.