Collecting happies

Hiya lovelies, how are you? Do you have snow? It is cold here, but the sun is out and that is making me happy! In fact, it seems like the perfect day to share a little thing I’m doing this year. I was inspired by a picture I saw shared on Facebook and I immediately loved the idea of it – a Happy Jar!

If you’ve been visiting me for a while, you’ll know that two years ago I attempted to join in with Little Birdie‘s 52 weeks of happy – documenting four small (or big!) things that had made me happy each week. It was a series of posts that I really enjoyed writing and part of me was quite sad that I fell behind and ultimately never made it to the end. Although 35/52 wasn’t a bad effort! You can read all of my happy posts here.

I’m hoping that this Happy Jar will be much easier and allow for more flexibility. I’m sure I’m a bit late to the Happy Jar/Good Things Jar party, but in case you’re not familiar the idea is that you jot down on a piece of paper a happy little something, fold it up and pop it in the jar. Then at the end of the year you sit down and dip into the jar or read them all and look back over the memories of the last 12 months.

I’ve decided to try and record one happy a day. I’m sure there’ll be times when I forget but I’m not going to let that stop me like it did with the 52 weeks of happy. So far though I’m doing well, in fact I’ve had a couple of days when I’ve written several as I couldn’t choose just one happy moment! Mostly it is just little things, memories, funny things that have been said, nice things that made me smile… yesterday’s was that my daffodils were opening and bringing some cheer to the place. I’m trying to keep it broad rather than just the new and exciting things our little boy is doing (as I have another place where I record that kind of thing) – although I am constantly amazed by how much he is learning at the moment. It’s a new thing every day!

I’m encouraging The Bert to add to the jar if and when he wants to as well (I don’t think he has just yet, he usually leaves these sorts of activities to me!), and when my parents were visiting last week I showed them the Happy Jar and said if they fancied popping something in from their stay then that would be lovely too – which they did! (probably because I was less breezy with my invitation and more ‘have you added something to my jar yet?’ about it!).

Fancy joining in? I don’t think it’s too late if you’d like to create your own Happy Jar, and you could make it as simple or fancy as you like. For mine I used:

• an old large Kilner jar that I had lying around – we had used it to make sloe gin but bottled it up just before Christmas for gifts (not realising that it actually wasn’t that nice, oops). This seemed like a great next use for the jar, although judging by how full it is after one month maybe I should have gone bigger!
• a lovely label – a few weeks in, I stumbled across the perfect label for my jar from Vicky Barone. How lovely to find a free download – that made me Happy! But if you like drawing or are good with computer graphics then you could make your own.
• bright, coloured paper – I started just using some plain paper to record my memories but when I saw Vicky’s jar I knew I wanted something a bit more fun too, so I picked up a stash of coloured paper and used my new paper cutter which I got for Christmas (sooo thrilled!) to make 7x7cm squares. And then, because I am quite particular about these sorts of things, I copied out the ones I’d already written onto my new jolly squares, folded them up and dropped them in. Luckily there were only about 10 to re-do.

And that’s it! I reckon this will be lovely to keep long-term too. Imagine looking back through all your notes in 10 years time!

Do let me know if you decide to start one too, or if you do this already, or if you have another way of remembering the little things as I’d love to get ideas for next year.

My happy for today?

Jones x