Giving Thanks for Laughter

I turned the calendar page and suddenly the end of the year frenzy is about to engulf us all once again.  Not me.  Not this year.  With each passing year I become more and more disgusted, discouraged and disengaged from the holiday rush.  I love having my family for Thanksgiving dinner and I love having them over for Christmas.  I do NOT love the commercialization that has consumed our country and I do my dead level best not to succumb to it.  This year I am even more resolved not to give in. 

This year, we will once again enjoy the opportunity to gather as a family in our home.  We will eat and laugh, play some games with the gusto of the most rabid of NFL fans, laugh some more at each other, at ourselves and at ridiculous things we will make up, not to mention stories from that past that may or may not have an element of truth to them.  We will probably eat again.  And did I happen to mention we will laugh?

That's because a wiser person than me once said, "laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone."  Sometimes, it is important to weep with someone else.  Empathy should not be a lost art in our society.  When someone is truly hurting often there are no words of comfort. But when you look into the face of your dearest friend and see them share the burden of your heart through their tears or the pain in your own eyes reflected in theirs, it is somehow comforting.

But I digress.

Laughing though?  It makes everything seem somehow more bearable. I have laughed at some absolutely inappropriate times and felt bad about it.  That is, until someone else joins in and suddenly a terrible burden is somehow made lighter if only for the few minutes our minds were not fixated on it.

November.  Thanksgiving.  There is much to be thankful for and laughter, even irreverent laughter is one of them.

I have tried to instill in my kids the sense that being thankful isn't just something we do one day out of the year; it should be a mindset, a way of life, something that we look for each day.  I don't know if I've been fully successful with this yet, but I sure do have hope when I hear one of them say, "Mom, look at the sky!  Isn't the sunset beautiful?  It's so cool that God reminds us of Himself with the colors of the sky."

Indeed it is kiddo.

And then I say a prayer for thankfulness for God's goodness and faithfulness.