Laughter: The Best Medicine

Laughter really is the best medicine. Too many of us have forgotten how to laugh, and have become far too serious. If you don’t believe me, take a look around you. There are too many unhappy people–you can see it in their body language and their faces. It’s not healthy. And life is too short not to make the most of it.

I was born into a family that loved to laugh. They also liked to yell a lot, and many fond childhood memories are of family gatherings filled with loud Eastern European voices yelling over each other to be heard punctuated with bursts of hearty laughter. I remember my paternal grandmother laughing so uproariously that tears streamed down her face. Ah, those were the good old days.

Everyone in my family has a sharp wit and wicked sense of humor, but my mother and her older brother were the masters of humor, pranks, and trickery. It was in their DNA and they fine-tuned their skill by learning at the feet of the master, my grandfather. Good grief, that man was funny!

My mother used every April Fool’s Day to play a joke on me and my sisters by taking liberties with our lunches. Peanut butter sandwiches were laced with rubber bands. Ham sandwiches were a piece of paper between 2 sliced of bread which read “this is not a ham sandwich.” Hard boiled eggs weren’t. They were raw.

Of course, we learned to expect it, and so did our friends. They couldn’t wait for us to open our brown bags to see what devilment our mom cooked up, so to speak. And, everyone got a good laugh out of it. I still do.

So, this April Fool’s Day, remember that laughter really is the best medicine. It’s right up there with high quality dark chocolate and good wine. It beats the heck out of being unhappy.