A Smile on Every Page

I have always LOVED off-the-wall calendars.

You know the ones. Each day there is a new exciting thing to unveil. I have had tons of them; cartoons, definitions, word puzzles, paintings. My dad always had a Far Side calendar on his desk and he would bring me any especially funny comics and we would chuckle over them together. I could always rely on finding a Mary Engelbreit calendar from my mother in my Christmas stocking every year growing up. I saved pages upon pages of these cute pictures and quotes to paste into my scrapbooks or turn into little cards for my friends. Once I received a Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul calendar for my birthday and LOVED all the inspirational stories. I even had a Worst-Case Scenario one at some point. It taught me how to escape from a car dangling over the edge of a cliff, how to fend off an alligator, how to survive a fire at the top of a skyscraper, and how to pull a 180 turn in a car (I admit that I DID try that one out. Bad idea. I was not meant for stunt driving). I marveled over my optical illusion calendar. How do people come up with those things? The lady that looks a hundred years old when you look at her one way and like a young beautiful girls the other, the lumpy old man made entirely of vegetables, the checkerboards that have all the imaginary dots in them. It is crazy! Anyways, I saved all of my favorite days from all of my favorite calendars and still have them at the bottom of my drawer, carted through 7 years of post-high school moves. There is a happy nostalgia from flipping through them. They always make me smile.

So for fun, I flipped through all of my old clippings and sorted them out. One of my favorites of all time is a picture done my Mary Engelbreit. Looking out of a windowsill are two young girls, a blonde and a brunette. On the ledge are beautiful flower boxes. Butterflies flutter all around. Oranges are hanging on the branches in the tree above. The blondie is looking grouchy and bored. The brunette has the most adorable contented smile on her face as she embraces the gorgeous flowers all around her. How often are we caught up in something that ticked us off and therefore we fail to notice all the beauty around us? Included with the picture is a marvelous quote by Abraham Lincoln:

"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

One of my seventh grade teachers had a marvelous off the wall calendar she left on her desk. It was based on the book 14,000 Things to Be Happy About by Barbara Ann Kipfer. Every day I would walk into class and read the happy thing for the day, be it marshmallows in your hot cocoa to rain drops on your face. I discovered Barbara's website today. It is a wonderful little daily calendar online with tons of things to be happy about, both from the book and things that people have submitted. There are over 142,000 things on the list so far. If you are having a hard time thinking of something to be happy about, this is a great place to get one, or a hundred thousand, reasons! Check it out!

Let's decide to be happy TODAY! Ready, set, go!!!