As is traditional this time of year, just about every media publication in existence will talk (and encourage you) to make a New Year's Resolution.

Where did this particularly dreadful ritual come from? We've just gotten through one of the nicest Christmases ever spent on a landmark-glorious-weather day.

Everyone surfeited (and glowing from) family gatherings and good will to all. Why should that wonderful feeling of community be spoiled in less than one week by being implicitly reminded that indulging is not good for the body or the soul?

I think making resolutions came down through the ages from those rigid Pilgrim fathers (and mothers) of long ago in the Northeast who could not even allow themselves to have a good time, love a little, laugh a little, sing and dance a little, without feeling eternal guilt.

A bit of research proved me wrong. The celebration of the New Year is the oldest of all holidays. First prioritised in ancient Babylon, it started March 23 and lasted eleven days.

Those Babys really liked to party; we modern festivity makers have nothing in comparison! Thus, New Year's resolutions came quite naturally (after almost two weeks of endless excess) to tradition for early Babylonians; their most popular goal not being to renew physical wellness, but to promise to return borrowed farm equipment.

The Romans used a different calendar, naming the first month of the year after the mythical figure of Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors.

Janus, the god with two-faces each looking in opposite directions, signifying beginnings and endings.

Worshipped at the beginning of the harvest time, planting, marriage, birth, especially the beginnings of important events in a person's life, Janus transitioned between primitive life and civilisation, between the countryside and the city, peace and war, and the emergence from child to adulthood.

The Romans celebrated the coming of the New Year on January 1st by exchanging gifts, and resolutions; a common one was to seek forgiveness from enemies of previous years.

Psychologists and healthcare professionals will tell you that people make the same resolutions year after year ? an average of ten times ? with limited success.

Resolutions have a very short life indeed: 25 per cent give up by the end of the first week! The Top Ten Most Common New Year's Resolutions taken from various Internet websites are:

Lose weight.

Stop smokingreducing the use of tobacco, alcohol, caffeine or other drugs.

Stick to a budgetsave or earn more money.

Increase time devoted to study or work.

Find a better job.

Become more organised ? declutter.

Increase the amount of exercise.

Be more patient at work and with others.

Eat better ? increasing the consumption of healthy food.

Become a better person self development.Instead of resolving and recriminations when these impossible goals we set for ourselves get tossed to be replaced by common sense, why don't we simply think about being grateful, for where we are and what we have? eel grateful that you do know where your next meal is coming from. You even have the right to choose what you want to eat.Focus on that pay check which goes into your bank account, month in, month out. Or you could picture yourself in an unemployment line with hundreds of other job seekers, or taking your life in your hands sneaking across the desert Texas border to get a job, any job.One out of eight women who have lost body parts to cancer would gladly trade places with you; so would thousands of men debilitated by strokes.Look around your community, carefully. Many women and men are here in the land of golden opportunity to work and fund basic family needs in their native country. Some of them may not see their children and their relatives (and live among them) for the rest of their lives. They have made huge personal sacrifices as foreign breadwinners, their families best and only hope.The glass is half full, you probably have another thirty years to live, to love, to relish existing! The average age of mortality in third world countries is 45. Be grateful you can volunteer and help someone needing your care and thoughtfulness., ? At least they still have you, and you have another chance to influence them. We've seen those thousands of abandoned children, without parents picking through a massive garbage dumps to find something, anything to eat, or sitting in a wasteland of illness with hope fading from their eyes. The opportunity to be successful is still here in a free society with free speech and the right to free individual choices.

The thing is with New Year's Resolutions, you do have the power and the ability to change. Think about it and choose. Be grateful for your life. Now live it, to the fullest this year.