Always Look On The Bright Side – Five things that made me smile in December.

A bit of a different one for this feature this month. It has to be said that December was a bit of a disaster for me personally. It became clear that from pretty much the start of the month that I was poorly and this developed and stayed with me for almost the whole of the month. A lovely chest infection coupled with a sinus problem! So, moments of happiness were in short supply!

So, where were those few smiles?

Sunrises. Winter seems to bring with it some spectacular sunrises and I’m lucky enough to be able to catch a lot of them on my way to work. This December was no exception. I only have a short commute; about 7 minutes. This means that there’s not a lot of time sat in traffic, which means that I don’t get to enjoy the scenery or the sunrises. It also means that the car never has long enough to heat up in winter, but that’s another story! Brilliantly though, there’s a point in my journey where on either side of me is just beautiful countryside and when the sun is coming up and there’s no cloud it can be quite spectacular. Luckily for me, there were a number of those moments last month.

A giant advent calendar. This was a story I read about a charity advent calendar in Chorley, Lancashire that was made from 24 shipping containers. Each day a container of gifts was donated to a local charity as part of the Cash for Kids Mission Christmas campaign. I mean, what a wonderful thing to do. The kind of thing that helps you restore your faith in humanity. It couldn’t fail to make even the biggest Scrooge smile, could it?

The end of a long term. The first term of an academic year is always tough. And I know that people love to moan about teacher’s holidays – another thing that never fails to make me smile; if you’re so infatuated with our holidays, train to be a teacher – and I get that when we start again in September it’s off the back of 6 weeks off over summer. Still, that first term back is always a hard one, believe me. So, after 15 weeks of a term I was fully ready for the Christmas break and a glorious two weeks off. Smiles aplenty!

Family. I’ve lived away from my family in Newcastle for just over 30 years now and distance and busy schedules mean that I don’t get to see them very often. Christmas gives me that opportunity and even though we only managed a day this year due to my daughter’s busy work schedule, it was precious time spent with my closest family. It’s always lovely to see my parents engaging with with my kids – their grandchildren – and it always makes me smile. It was also good to see that my sister was healthy after a difficult year for her. And I must say, I enjoy giving presents, so watching my parents open their gifts is always good, especially my dad’s reactions; opens gift, looks at it for approximately 4 seconds, puts it down and just says ‘Aye’. The same every year!

A brass band! Every Christmas my local supermarket gets a brass band to come in and play carols on a Saturday morning close to Christmas. It’s always such a wonderful sound and that, plain and simple, is what made me smile!

And that was that for last month. I was poorly for almost the whole month and although I enjoyed the whole lead up to Christmas, there just weren’t as many smiles as usual!

Here’s hoping that January perks things up a bit!