The Little Things Jar

On New Year's Day I put an empty pickle jar on the kitchen counter with a pen and a stack of scrap paper. The rule: whenever something good happens, no matter how small, write it down and drop it in.

By December it was overflowing. On New Year's Eve, we dumped it out on the table and read every note aloud.

"Dad made pancakes shaped like dinosaurs." "Found a five-dollar bill in the laundry." "Grandma learned to video call and only showed us her ear for the first ten minutes." "The tomatoes finally came in." "Sam lost his first tooth and the tooth fairy forgot, but then she remembered." "We saw a rainbow on the way to the dentist."

There were 213 notes. My kids laughed so hard at some of them they fell off their chairs. We have a new jar on the counter now. The first note is already in: "We read the old jar together."