Hailey Bartholomew was feeling depressed. So she decided to remind herself of one thing she was thankful for every day, and to take a Polaroid photo of it. But it didn't work so she crawled under the covers and never came out again.

Wait, not really! What actually resulted was that this chore she'd created for herself became an incredibly life-affirming project. She began to notice the things she loved that she'd been overlooking -- most of all her marriage. Her relationships improved. Her health improved. Her spiritual life improved. And what's more, she found that her project was inspiring others to be thankful for everything around them, too. She's working on a documentary about how being grateful affected real change in her life, and you can watch a wonderful video about it here.

There are many ways to acknowledge our gratitude, but I love Bartholomew's unique angle of creating actual photographs, actual artifacts. The other day I realized my daughter had been a little too quiet for a little too long, and I peeked into my bedroom, where she was "having alone time." She looked up from the massive pile of photos I'd been meaning to put in an album, and smiled a guilty, mystified smile and said, "This is really interesting."

It is really interesting, isn't it, how we can hold a moment in our hands? We're so used to seeing pictures online that the actual photograph has become an object that calls attention to itself, that makes us pause, that induces us to actually look in a way we don't when clicking through a Flickr album.

What are you grateful for? Go on, snap a photo of it. And print it. And hold it in your hands.

Read More:
Spread Gratitude With Oprah's Thank You Game
Gratitude Journals