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Every year, we usually find a few minutes to write in this space about New Year’s resolutions. We all make them. We want to lose weight, be a better person, sleep better, drink more water, curse less, spend our time wiser, give up social media … and the list goes on and on. For most of us, reality hits about a week into January, and we’re right back to doing all of the things we vowed to improve about ourselves.

We wish you luck as you try to make a few resolutions again this year, but we also hope you’ll add a few things to your list.

For instance, instead of just trying to lose weight, we hope you’ll think about all of the major changes we all endured this year. We hope that if you’re healthy — or at least not sick with COVID-19 — that you wake up thankful for that. 

We hope that if you’ve overcome the disease or didn’t get very sick, that you are thankful.

And more than anything, we hope you’re appreciative of family members, who really doubled down as our closest friends when businesses had to close and we had to shelter in place.

Although it’s not any time soon, one of these days, the masks will probably come off, and we’ll be able to stand closer to six feet of somebody without feeling like we’re infecting them with COVID-19. Hopefully, that day will come in 2021.

There’s a lot to look forward to this coming year, but most of those things wouldn’t qualify in other years. If you had “walking around in public without a face mask on” on your resolution list in 2020, you would’ve looked insane.

So, who knows what 2021 holds. Hopefully, less bad and a lot more good.

But in the meantime, we hope you’ll take a few minutes to think about the good in your own life, appreciate what is going right, and be thankful for your health and the family and friends around you.

And when you make resolutions, we hope you’ll think about all the things you missed this year. That local event you couldn’t go to, that local restaurant that you typically frequent but couldn’t. That local person you used to go visit but haven’t been able to.

One day, we’ll be back to “normal” and those things can happen again. Until then, we all know what we’ll be wishing for as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve.