The holiday season is upon us and it’s rather easy to overlook taking time to feel gratitude when we are bombarded by what media feeds us this time of year.
Appeals for year-end and Giving Tuesday donations (Yes, even from us here at the Gazette.) flood our mailboxes and email in-boxes.
What seems an ever-escalating torrent of social media and political messages meant to have us cowering in fear, rejoicing at the misfortune of others or mindlessly lost in following pointless posts, bombards those of us who spend even a bit of time online
Both Lionel Hampton and A.A.Milne’s fictional Piglet remind us there’s something important in staying in touch with our heart.
Says Hampton, “Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.”
That might be a reminder to step away from our devices, turn off the TV and radio, put down books, magazines and newspapers to take a quiet moment for ourselves, or even with one or more real people, to have a simple conversation.
What might fill our hearts in moments without the usual interruptions?
In those moments, Piglet reminds us our hearts have endless capacity when Milne has him say, “Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.”
The Gazette newsroom is among the more chaotic places in the neighborhood most days. Today is no exception. The coming arrival of Thanksgiving and the end of our first nonprofit year, has us opening our hearts to remember what we are thankful for.
We are thankful for two very generous benefactors, including former owners Ray and Kim Small, and an anonymous donor who matched their gift for us to use as a match to our first $10,000 in donations.
We are grateful for five generous grants, often coming when they were very much needed.
We are thankful for the Center for Arts and Learning who guaranteed our donors could make tax-deductible gifts while we waited for our own IRS status to be approved.
We even appreciate the IRS approval of that status.
We are thankful for the many individual donors and advertisers who help fund our work.
We are grateful for volunteers who have each done their part, from serving as board members, to writing thank-you notes, to helping format photos, post to our website and straighten out a mess in our archives.
We are thankful for interns, community journalists, photographers and contributors who have provided the news, editorials, events and sports content that fills our pages.
Most importantly, we are thankful for you, our readers, for giving us a reason to do this work.
Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
