Last year someone recommended starting a gratitude jar with the start of the new year. I wrote things I was grateful for on little slips of pretty paper starting on January 1, 2013, and into the jar they went.
November 2013
I read the contents of the jar yesterday evening: New Year’s Eve 2013. Counting my blessings from 2013 seems an excellent way to end the year and to begin a new one. I ended up with 139 entries from throughout the year, which is an entry every ~2.5 days.
31 December 2013
I thought about sharing some of the more meaningful ones to Facebook or Twitter as I read them. I quickly realized that not too many people would be interested in reading them. Many of my gratitude entries were of the mundane sort. One day I was grateful for toaster waffles… 
But that’s the point! We often forget those little blessings in our life. We take for granted the little things that bring a smile or contribute to our happiness.
My main conundrum has been what to do with those 139 pieces of paper? Part of me says to start fresh and throw the old ones out. Another part says it would be tragic to throw out so many little pieces of positivity.
After pondering about this for a bit, I came upon a solution. I’m going to slide the gratitude entries into my journals. Whenever I go back to read the journals, there will be little pieces of gratitude distributed among the pages regardless of the other things I have written about (i.e. not always sun and roses). Even in the darkest depths of what I write about in my journal, there will be that spark of positivity nearby.
I like that idea. 
I’m going to continue this tradition into 2014. I’ve already got something in the jar! It feels pretty good to start the new year with gratitude.
Happy New Year!
My friend told me about the Gratitude Jar she did last year today whilst I tried to work out how to remember all the good things that will happen this year in and out of my down stages and I decided to start one today. I’m pleased to read you put toaster waffles as one as I’m sure I will have those sort too! Great idea to put last years in your diary, I think I might nab that idea!
Hope you have a great 2014 🙂
I hope you enjoy your gratitude jar as much as I’ve enjoyed mine. I think the small things that go in the gratitude jar are perhaps more important than the big. So, yay, to toaster waffles and all of the other small things that make us smile! 🙂
I decided to do something a bit different with my gratitude jar entries. I decided to burn them. I was afraid that the first time I picked up one of my old journals, those entries would fall out and those bits of positivity would turn into bits of frustration because I’d have to pick them back up and put them back in the journal. By burning them, I like to think I’m releasing that positivity back into the universe. Pagans say that any energy you release comes back to you x3. I’ll take 3x the positivity contained in these entries… 🙂
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