Laughter...

I had just realized that the show I was watching on the television had ended and my digital video recorder better known as the DVR had more or less put my TV in a paused state. I don't know how long it had been frozen in this manner but I have a feeling it had been this way for a while. So I turned off the "telly" and all its audio/visual counterparts and just sat on my couch for a while enjoying the few moments of solitude and my "shiny" thoughts.  My trail of "shiny" thoughts went like this:

- I should probably go to bed...
- But my head hurts...
- Maybe I should turn off the Christmas tree lights and go to bed...
- Holy Cow! I haven't updated my blog for weeks...
- I'll blog tomorrow, I need to go to bed...
- "The boy" is talking incredibly loud (we call our son "boy")...
- I think I am going to go to bed...
- What the heck is that in the transom window?...
And it is that last "Shiny" thought that brought me to my topic...Laughter.

Laughter is an amazing blessing. Laughter can cheer you up when you are down. In my simple opinion, laughter can cure many ills. In fact, I consider myself extremely blessed because I laugh at least once every day.

With this in mind, let me tell you about my day yesterday, it started pretty much like most days with me heading in to work. However, it ended up being one of those days that never seems to end. I arrived to work at 9:30 in the morning and worked until sometime past 8:00 in the evening. These kind of days are rough on me because they are the days that I usually find myself hyper-focused on whatever task I am buried under. This intense type of focus often causes me to lose track of time and forget to eat something, therefore making me extremely cranky. This is usually about the time that the "grumpies" rear their ugly heads and I realize the problem. Yesterday the "grumpies" showed up around 7 o'clock and it was a little over an hour later that I decided to go home as I was no longer of any value to the task I was trying to relentlessly accomplish. So I headed out of the building to my vehicle in hopes of quickly making my way home to a plate of slow-cooked pork roast and cheesy bacon mashed potatoes. The thought made my mouth water.

Now I work approximately seven and a half miles from where I live and there are 22 stop lights in between these two locations.  The commute takes approximately 15-20 minutes when all conditions are right. Rush hour drastically increases travel time to anywhere from a half an hour to an hour.  So one would assume that since it is 8'ish there would most likely be no traffic and you guessed it...there wasn't any traffic.

As I go driving out of the parking lot, I hit my first red light, no biggie, this light is usually red. Then the second light was red and the third turned red as I approached it and so went my drive home. Every light between my work and home turned red as I approached them. Needless to say, by the time I pulled into my little tract of homes, I was extremely hungry, frustrated and I had an extremely bad case of the "grumpies".

Then I saw it! As I was pulling in the driveway I saw him...I saw Chippy! Chippy is our "Elf on a Shelf" doll. He came as part of a Christmas story that I bought a few years back from Barnes and Noble.  This year there was a half an hour Christmas cartoon about him.  Chippy's story in a nutshell is that he is a special elf who goes undercover to an unsuspecting child who no longer believes in Santa Claus and the corresponding Christmas magic. He infiltrates the home of the child skeptic by luring said child's parents into bringing him home under the guise of starting a new Christmas tradition. Once in the home, Chippy reports back to the North Pole and Santa about the progress or worsening loss of holiday spirit in the child. It is this process of reporting in nightly that causes Chippy to find a new location every morning, so you see Chippy is never in the same spot twice.

My daughter, George, has undertaken the movement of Chippy in our home and it has been quite comical. I have been startled by Chippy many times in the last few weeks. I will go turn on a light and be startled as I catch a glimpse of Chippy sitting in a wreath next to my head or there is that moment when talking to my daughter that I get all "shiny" because I notice the freakish little elf is riding one of the reindeer attached to the Christmas stocking holder on the mantle. I mean just this morning as I was heading out, I spied Chippy in one of my decorative apothecary jars, positioned as if he were stuck and trying desperately to escape his glass prison.

So tonight, as I pulled into my driveway, I saw him sitting in the transom window above my front door, visible to the street. That's when it happened...I laughed. This was not a chuckle, this was one of those full on, real life, laugh out loud moments. You know those moments when you realize you are laughing and there is no one even around to hear you? For me, those are extremely happy moments. I got out of my car and headed toward the door laughing,  then paused briefly to take a picture and continued on to my front door. Then wouldn't you know it, the door wouldn't unlock but in this moment that didn't matter. So I rang the doorbell and happily waited for my family to open the door for me, all the while laughing. It was this laughter that cured my bad attitude.

It is incredible to me how a little laughter can make everything better. How something as simple as the placement of a doll, can change one's mood and make you more cheerful. How in that instance, all the stresses and frustrations of life that could easily depress you just seem to disappear.  Have you had a good dose of some healthy laughter recently?

"A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength." - Proverbs 17:22 (New Living Translation)