- Rededicate your life to promoting love, kindness and positive energy to humans and animals in the coming year. Dedicate yourself to help this planet heal itself. Take action to move toward recycling, reuse, no waste and everything more ecological.
- What about tragedy? There's plenty of tragedy to go around this Christmas. Let's work individually to bring a smile to anyone we pass in the streets with a, "Merry Christmas." Forgive those who have harmed us or insulted us or spoke poorly of us.
- If you remember Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, at his darkest hour in 1863, he wrote Christmas Bells, a poem still song today. Read the words as he works through the loss of his first wife, and then, his second wife, and then 51,000 soldiers who died at Gettysburg during the Civil War. His soul felt torn, yet he dedicated himself to live with love.
- In your family, ring the bell of truth. Stand up for decency and honor. Rejuvenate your caring for all of humanity. Christmas is about the larger truth of humanness.
This Christmas 2021, instead of being a spectator, become expansive. Activate yourself toward the good.
On April 24, 1910, President Teddy Roosevelt gave this speech that I have hung up on my office wall: The Man in the Arena.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man/woman who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." Teddy Roosevelt
In 2022, let each one of us give a gift of dedication to America, our country, our home, our life. We are all men and women in "The Arena of America." Let's each work to make America a better place for all of us.
May God bless you, Merry Christmas to you and yours,
Sandi and Frosty
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