"Every day is Christmas..."

Just found out yet another person I know died in a car accident yesterday... I moved from the city life to  the small town life in the mid-nineties and there are lots of advantages. Dying isn't one of them evidently. I don't know if it's because you know everybody in a small town or if it really is true, but deaths seem much higher here. I know they are with young people dying. It's almost epidemic. There have been way too many young people here dying of illness and car accidents that even the Austin news has picked up on it.
But we have a stretch of highway for about 20 miles between here and Austin that loses people EVERY weekend in head-on collisions. It's ridiculous. But I guess when you have a 2 lane highway where both sides are going 70 mph, and one person _____________ (fill in the blank - texts, hiccups, sneezes, looks at the pretty scenery, is lost, looks back at their child, etc etc) then BLAMMO, you've crossed the line of milli-seconds and hello eternity...
Ugh.
It's always so sudden. Death is so sudden. My next door neighbor died on Friday. Her grown son had told me not to be alarmed if ambulances pulled up since hospice had been called in and she was in the final stages of her life. I prayed for her every time I drove in the driveway and remembered the words my mother said as she was dying of cancer, "Every day is Christmas."
 Live in the present - it's all you've got...