Thanksgiving with a "Gratitude Attidude"

Brooks and I celebrated our Thanksgiving a little different this year. Yes you are looking at pictures of the Denver Broncos in Mile High stadium. This was a unique and fun way for us to spend Thanksgiving. We did miss our families and the good food but we still had a pretty great time. Our hotel was attached to a restaurant but we were informed when we arrived the day before, that the restaurant would be closed on Thanksgiving day! BUT, the hotel stated that they would provide a free breakfast and boxed dinner for everyone staying there. We thought that this would be fine since we didn't rent a car and there wasn't anywhere close by to eat. SO on Thanksgiving morning, we found the free "breakfast" which amounted to a muffin or a danish. This didn't really concern us since we knew we could eat at the game, which we did and enjoyed a hot dog for me and a hamburger for Brooks. We left the game a little early (since the Broncos had it well in hand) to return to the hotel in enough time to pick up a boxed dinner. When we got back to our hotel, the staff informed us that they were out of dinners! NOW we were unhappy, so we went to the vending machines and had chips and pop! The next morning we got Brooks some pie (ya, for Thanksgiving) from McDonald's at the airport. As you can understand, we really did miss the good Thanksgiving food. I think I'll cook a turkey for Christmas to make up for it. I took these pics with my phone because I forgot my camera.

I have been going to write about gratitude for the past month but like Tami I am late. I guess my intentions are always better than my actions. I read an article a few weeks ago in the Readers Digest about having a gratitude attitude and it really touched me. The article mentions a professor, Robert A. Emmons, from the University of California, Davis, who pioneered research on the benefits of positive thinking. Emmons quoted new studies that indicated that even pretending to be thankful raises levels of the chemicals associated with pleasure and contentment. He said that if you live as if you feel gratitude, soon the real thing will come. He recommended keeping a log of everything we're grateful for in a given week or month. One major study showed that people who wrote down what they are grateful for felt 25 percent happier after ten weeks than those who did not. They even felt better about their jobs and exercised an hour and a half more per week!

Now, here's the part that really hit me....The author states that "Gratitude is never so important as during those times when everything appears to be lost. Finding something to appreciate, can save us from absolute despair--in a way that abject complaining cannot." The author also states that he discovered this truth while he was driving a friend of his with cancer to his chemo treatments. Despite his suffering (or because of it) they became more connected. The friend stated "I realized when I got sick that I'd spent years worrying about things that mean absolutely nothing, celebrating life while it's here, was most important now!"

I realize that this author most likely knows nothing about the eternities or our religious beliefs but I still think that getting through mortality with a better attitude can't hurt.

So now here is my meager attempt at jotting down some of the things that I'm grateful for this past week:

Diet Sunkist

Grateful that Brooks made it through his first colonoscopy prep without killing me.

That I can still get up in the morning and feel pretty good.

A warm house

Grandchildren

My Children

My new kitchen

Family

Extended family

A good job

That I got out of work today at a decent time

The gospel and my testimony

Christmas

Did I say grandchildren?

Laughter

People with a good sense of humor

sleep

Chocolate

Cheese fries

I'm not starving

My tempurpedic bed

Polite drivers

My insulin pump

Blue

Flowers

Warm weather

Patients that smile and say "thank you"

Choices

To be busy

Grandchildren!