Christmas attitude of gratitude

This year has been quite a challenge, so I have quite a long list of things I’m grateful for, and in this post I’d like to highlight a few of the people I’m grateful for, as 2018 slowly draws to a close.

As noted in my previous post, California has experienced some pretty crazy wildfires this year, and I’ve personally lived through two of them. As such, I am extremely grateful that my family and cats are all safe and sound.

I’m also grateful for all of the folks who reached out to say “we’ve got your back,” when I wrote my last blog post. It was a scary time, and it felt really good to hear from members of the San Diego Writers & Editors Guild – especially President Mardie Schroeder – who told me they were eager to help in any way they could. This was incredibly helpful when I was freaking out about the toxic smoke over Sacramento.

Another big shout-out to Mother Nature, who helped clear all the smoke out by Thanksgiving Day.

I’d also like to thank my parents, who helped calm my fears from afar, and who were able to get some protective masks mailed to me and my husband before even Amazon’s suppliers. They’ve been incredibly supportive throughout this whole year, as well, helping us with the move from San Diego to Sacramento both physically and with various expenses. They have been the ones that have pulled us through, time and again, and both my husband and I are always asking ourselves, “How can we ever repay them?” Huge debt of gratitude to mom and dad, for always being there for us.

Another important person that I’ve been grateful for this year is my BFF, Jenna. We’ve been texting back and forth most days, just checking in on each other and sharing random news, and she has been great at motivating me to keep up with things like physical health goals. For whatever reason, it seems that if I actually tell someone about my goals, they become more real to me. I guess it’s the accountability of knowing that once my goals are revealed to a person in my life, they’re probably going to keep asking me about those goals until I meet them. My most recent physical fitness goal is walking 6.89 miles per day (an average I discovered I needed to hit when I checked my Fitbit yearly stats the other day), in an effort to walk a total of 1,500 miles this year. I’ve been slacking off periodically, and not always getting my 10,000 steps per day, but when I do keep up with my steps I can usually get about 4.4 miles in. She reminded me that it was just for 3 weeks, so I might as well go for it, so here I am, stepping away like a fiend. Wish me luck!

I fear this blog post is going to get unwieldy if I go on with too many more tales of gratitude, but those are some of the most important folks I wanted to publicly thank. I’m also planning on writing some more personal letters of gratitude to other important people in my life, as part of my annual Christmas letter-writing tradition, and since it’s already December 10 I guess I’d better get on it!

Do you ever write gratitude notes to the people you care about?

Who are some of the people you’ve thanked over the years?