Gratitude is an attitude that mental health professionals say promotes mental well-being. They advise practices such as noting three good things about each day and writing them down at night. Studies actually show that such habits durably improve mood. In the giving spirit of the Christmas season I would like to share with you one of our family traditions that, in retrospect, I realize promotes the gratitude attitude over the course of each year.

We began taking our boys to Colorado to learn to ski when they were very little. Economic and time constraints meant one week a year, determined by my husband’s surgical on-call schedule. That week included the turn of the year on New Year’s Eve. Children’s skiing torchlight parades, followed by dinner at a Chinese restaurant and early bedtimes gradually gave way to a movie (usually laughably bad) followed by dinner at a locals’ Italian restaurant with paper-covered tablecloths and crayons for doodling. The family expanded to include our boys’ friends – first as children and teenagers along for a vacation, then as young men who worked as ski instructors. Somewhere along the way we began the habit of discussing our five best days of the year over New Year’s Eve dinner.

The crayons and the paper table covers are very convenient – everyone begins jotting down their five best days, in order, almost as soon as the menus arrive. The entire dinner time winds up devoted to going around the table in five rounds, hearing from each person about what made each wonderful day and how they decided where to rank it in the list. The choices are life stories in snapshots, changing with growth and priorities. They are funny, poignant and surprising. We also hear from people who have been with us on past New Year’s Eves, calling, e-mailing, or texting their top five days, sometimes accompanied by pictures. They all get heard.

The reason this tradition promotes gratitude is a very practical one. If you know you are going to have to come up with your five best days of the year on New Year’s Eve you learn pretty quickly that memories are weak. You cannot cram for this test. You have to start noticing potential top five days as they happen over the course of the year. You start writing them down. Pretty soon you actually have a little journal and it contains good stuff. The good things that happen in life start to break into your awareness and compete with danger-surveillance program that runs continually in the background of your mind. All good, with none of the side effects of mood enhancing drugs (which fail in the long run anyway).

Just as a matter of historical interest, we traced this tradition back to its origins. It actually began with my husband’s surgical training at Massachusetts General Hospital. The surgical interns and residents on the general surgery service met at the end of each day and were asked to talk about the cases they helped with and to explain what they had learned. The practice helped everyone process what they had done and learn from their experiences. As a family, we were always sit-down dinner people,  with candles even when there was still a high chair at the table. Like the surgery residents, we  always talked about everyone’s day. Skiing days included lots of bests. Best fall, best jump, best run, best lift ride. The evolution to a summing up of bests at the end of a year was inevitable. What is a surprise is the way the practice has continued and spread from our families to others. Maybe you would like to give it a try.