The holiday season is coming, and the cultural message is that we need to host amazing dinner parties and buy expensive and well-thought-out gifts. While that certainly won’t hurt, it takes the attention away from why we are doing this in the first place.

For this holiday season, I am deciding to focus on something that actually matters to me, namely on expressing gratitude and appreciation to people that touched my life this year. I am going to make this really easy. Imagine an advent calendar (a sort of bonbonniere where children and adults alike eat one piece of chocolate for each day in December before Christmas Eve), but in inverse.

A photo of an advent calendar by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash.

Each day in December, I will spend five to ten minutes thinking about an experience that happened this year, that someone enabled and/or touched my life during. I will then write down a thank-you note where I specifically describe how this person affected me at that moment and in the time that followed, what I learnt from them and the experience, how I remember their efforts and why I am grateful. I will write this by hand, using complete sentences. If I still have their contact, I will share this note with them*, either direclty as handwriting, the photo therof, or as a typed message. Finally, I will crumple up the note and put it in a glass jar. At the end of the month, the jar will contain some twenty to thirty gratitude notes. I guess you could call it the emotional equivalent of a piggy bank.

Intuitively, this sounds like a good idea. For sure it’s a nice gift to give to someone and the other person will appreciate it. As I am writing this down, I am already super excited about reconnecting with my friends and others and sharing how they impacted my life.

But it goes quite a bit further, it is also a fantastic gift for oneself. There is lot of scientific literature to attest that gratitude practice is an extremely effective way to improve one’s mental and physical health. It encourages the savoring of positive life experiences and strengthens socials bonds. There is host of physiological benefits that have been reported in literature:

  • Self-reported physical health
  • Engagement in healthy and prosocial activities
  • Willingness to ask for help and advice
  • More feelings of happiness, pride, and hope
  • Greater feeling of social connection, strengthening of intimate bonds
  • Reduction in risk for depression, anxiety, and substance abuse
  • Improved biomarker profile for cardiovascular disease
  • Improvement of sleep and energy levels
  • Stress and illness resilience

This holiday season, I choose to be grateful. Will you join me?

Further Resources

  • Creating a Gratitude Practice
    • This document contains further rationale for estabilishing a gratitude practice, as well as more detailed instructions on how to implement it. It has multiple references for the health benefits described above.
  • Dr. Laurie Santos on the importance of gratitude
    • This part of Laurie Santos’s talk highlights the importance of gratitude practice, and how sharing it with others is beneficial for both the one sharing, as well as the one receving it.