12 Days of....Christmas...??

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve got a pretty impressive girlfriend. I decided that as part of her Christmas present this year. I would do a sort of “12 Days of Christmas” for her. But, of course, its going to have a few variants: First off, its going to be the “12 reasons I love her.” In addition, I decided that it would be a lot more fun to count down to the days until I get to see her again (Dec 15th). That probably has more to do with the fact that’s its gonna’ make these next couple of weeks a little more bearable. So, we start today. For those of you who aren’t Whitney, you may or may not enjoy this, but then again, I’m not writing it for you anyway

When I started to think about it, the first thing that popped into my head about Whitney was her smile. So it seems like it’s the best thing to start with, right? Whitney has the most beautiful smile. There are so many smiles out there that are tentative, forced, and insincere. Although Whitney does have one of those smiles (it mostly occurs when we’re having an awkward moment), her regular smile is something that spontaneously bursts out onto her face. Quite simply, it’s the result of her tendency to find joy in anything that is going on in her life. Which is really an accomplishment! If you really think about it, her life isn’t super exciting: she spends all day in a windowless office that is several stories underground dealing with books that are hundreds of years old. Then she gets to come home to a boyfriend who is four states away where sometimes her only contact with him is text messaging until 10:30 at night. But if you ever ask her how her day is going, you would think that she is living in the lap of luxury.

I remember asking her one day, “What makes you happy?” When most of us hear that question, we usually think of some specific situations that we love most. Whitney, on the other hand, has a whole list of things that make her happy. Some of the things on her list were complex, but so many of them were beautifully simple. She just knows how to be happy, even with the simplest of little things.