Gratitude

Beginning on November 1st, all over Facebook, people are posting every day the thing that they are most thankful for that day.   How nice it is to see people taking time to think about gratitude instead of stressing out about Christmas.   Thanksgiving gets short notice these days, with retail stores pushing a store full of Christmas items in your face two weeks before Halloween (the best darned holiday of the year) is even done with.

I’m fed up with it.   The newspaper was full of ads this week and I hear that retail stores are going to start pushing Black Friday early.  Black Friday irritates me.   I get disgusted that retail expects people to get up from their family dinner, neglect their family and go stand in a line to chase after material things that really mean nothing.   And what about the cashiers and retail workers who can’t have a family dinner because they have to work extra hours and holiday hours getting ready for the “big sales”?    Ridiculous!

I’m fed up with the election, each participant saying ugly things about the other, my mailbox swamped with junk mail every day that repeats the same messages and my answering machine and phone busy with unwanted calls asking me my opinion on one candidate or the other.  The WASTE of the whole thing annoys me to no end.

So, what the heck do I have to be thankful about?   Plenty.

I have a loving family and plenty of little kids.   I have good friends.   I have met some way cool people online that I admire and some who encourage me.

I am thankful for people like Jon Bon Jovi.   I saw him on the Katie Couric show today.  He is a Jersey boy from way back in the day.   You don’t hear much about his music anymore.   Justin Bieber is more profitable news or gangsta rappers.  But he runs a restaurant in Jersey called Soul Kitchen and he feeds hungry people.   They can either pay what they can afford or they can volunteer to work in the kitchen.   HE should be the president!   I’d vote for a man like that……….a man who doesn’t help out just for show, but who does it quietly in the background and makes a difference.   On the day before the show, he said they fed 618 dinners for Jersey folks who had lost all they had in the hurricaine.   I’m impressed enough to send a small check to his fund.   I don’t have much,  but it won’t hurt me to share.   If this intersts you also, here is a link to his site.

I’m also thankful for little things.  I seem to be getting lucky, heck, I AM lucky!   It started when I won those two things at Pagan Pride Day raffle.  I won those beads last week on a blog giveaway.   This week, yep, I won something again on another blog giveaway.   I won this book from Glass Addiction’s blog.   It’s called Project Earrings and has 44 different tutorials for earrings.   Earrings are a perfect Christmas gift, easy to make and almost everyone likes them so it will really come in handy.

Now, if I could just get lucky enough to win the lottery, I would REALLY be thankful!

Are you thankful too?