The holidays are an excellent time for reflection on the year and your life in general.

It’s been a particularly challenging year for me. My mom passed away in August. As we approach the holidays and you’ve lost someone close to you, it gets even more challenging. My dad passed away 14 years ago. I just never thought that I’d have to walk through this life without my parents in it. That’s challenging for me and I reflect on that. When I reflect on this, there are definitely themes that present themselves.

One thing that is important to me is that I take care of myself. Health is truly a priority in my life. It’s not something that I just talk about, it’s something that I live and do. We only have one life here, one body and we need to take care of this body that we were given. We don’t want to abuse that by sticking junk into this body. We want to make sure we are putting high-quality foods, high-quality thoughts into this body. We really want to take care of ourselves. I want to make health a priority in my life.

Another thing that is important to me is being grateful and having gratitude, being thankful for everything that I do have. I have lots of blessings in my life. I live in appreciation for all of these great blessings in my life.

As we approach the holiday season, another theme is giving. We should always give. When most people think of giving, they think of giving stuff. I mean the giving of yourself. We are all given wonderful, great, unique talents. We need to share our gifts and talents with the world. This is what I mean by giving.

Another important theme is love. We’ve been put on this earth to love one another. This is especially important around the holidays. It should be all year round. We want to love, love wholeheartedly. We want to tell the people around us how much we love them and hold them close to us and show that love.

As I reflect on the holidays, another theme that is important is having laughter in our lives. Anyone who knows my parents, will remember them as having great laughs. On their tombstone it says “LIVE, LOVE, LAUGH”. Just bring joy to every situation. Making sure that you have fun, enjoy life, bring that joy into every situation and bring laughter into every situation.

As I reflect on the holidays, these are the themes that really stand out to me and what I wanted to share with you. I hope you found this helpful in anyway, or valuable.

Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Enjoy the holiday season!