Naughty or Nice

So I have been on a Hallmark Channel binge on the few hours I have at home these days. While I am cooking dinner after 11 hour days at the high school and then the elementary school, I turn on Hallmark Channel and watch the most wonderfully cheesy movies I have ever seen. They are sweet and idealistic and totally unlike life.

I love them because they are like Elvis movies: wonderfully predictable. They start our sweet have a bit of trouble and the girl always ends up with the guy who is handsome and sweet and impossibly perfect. And  they manage to throw in a life lesson that is meant to teach us to be better.

I eat them up.

There is one called Naughty or Nice. It is about a woman who loses her job and becomes a bit bitter after having to take a gift wrapping job at a local department store. Her name is Crissy Cringle. She hates her name. Well - because of her name and because she lives on Candy Cane Lane she receives a book from someone that is called Naughty or Nice. She finds this book gives her the dirt on all the people around her. She is so unhappy in her current circumstances that she is in that she willingly looks up the dirt on her neighbor, then two girls at the coffee shop and eventually on her boyfriend. She uses the information against them to revenge herself and eventually to find out why her boyfriend is so busy - without her. She gets herself into all kinds of scrapes because of it. She knows that she is doing wrong but her bitterness causes her to use it without remorse until it bites her in the butt.

She sicks the book on her boyfriend and construes the information as he is cheating on her. He is so not. She confronts him and he is hurt and drops her like a hot potato.

She turns the corner, realizes that she is so wrong and sets out to fix it. She realizes that all people have naughty sides. Everyone has something that will put them on Santa's naughty list. But she also finds that people have nice sides as well.

What I LOVE about this is that I see it in myself. You cannot look at someone and see just their naughty side without also looking for their nice side. Not unless you are willing to see your own crap without tempering it with the good stuff. People rarely are bad without having a good side.

So - my point here is - I encourage you, when confronted with the nasty, to look for the nice before tearing into them. It is so easy when life is beating us up, to see just the yuck in people. Please look for the good as well....it is there...just not always apparent to us.

Make sure you practice seeing the good in people. Regardless of how inherently bad we are (because all of us know we are not perfect) we can learn to see the best in others. It will cause OURSELVES to be happier. In doing so, my prayer is, we actually learn to look for the good automatically and that it will in turn cause us to be a little easier on ourselves. 

God bless and keep you this Christmas Season.

I pray you find perspective and peace in the midst of all of the hubbub!