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By nature many would be within their rights to consider me a cynical man.

I’m not the worst pessimist you’ll come across, certainly, but I can be a Debbie Downer from time to time.

If I am to continue along this trend, I should probably admit to you that I have become less and less of a Christmas soul in more recent years. Yes, I’m distinctly in Camp Halloween, but I have become less and less sold on the final holiday of the year because of the commercial nature of the holiday.

I feel I’ve been fairly open about this with many who I’m friends with, but also more than a little obvious with the side shots I take at the holiday in public.

Or maybe I’m just a little downtrodden by the year itself and taking it out on Christmas. Who’s to say — this year.

Even with all of that now in the open, I must add that I’m not always Ebenezer Scrooge (disappointed in the fact that I don’t get three ghosts to haunt me. Life goals … get it? Life, ghosts … is this thing on?).

Rather, there are times where even I can see the good things that happen around us and just the other day we had just one of those things happen to us at home.

A package was delivered to our house the other night by an unknown person who drove to our house, walked up to our steps and left a package for us that had been accidentally delivered to the wrong house.

We never got the opportunity to talk to this person, which is a shame. We would have sincerely liked to thank this person for making the effort to make sure our package reached the right place.

In the newspaper business, we often here from Austin police of packages being taken from somebody’s front door. We’ve all seen video from Ring doorbell security systems of people brazenly walking up to a front door and swiping what clearly doesn’t belong to them.

It’s depressing, infuriating and invasive.

There are also times when packages aren’t delivered to the right spot and never will be, either because they are indeed lost or the people in the house won’t return the items and they are gone forever.

However, this isn’t the only time a package has been returned to us. On a couple of occasions I’ve had packages dropped off at the Herald by a magnificent woman after she found them accidentally delivered to her.

It’s always with a smile and a laugh.

I can say, in full honesty, that stories like these make me feel a little better about people and where we are.

Even though there are people who are genuinely happy during this time of year, it is easy to see the cynicism that is pervasive within these two months.

Christmas is too commercialized, there’s COVID-19, there is the tangle in Washington, spats around the globe.

It’s hard to see sometimes that there are still good people that do good things because it’s the right thing to do.

I don’t know this person that dropped our package off, but we appreciate the gesture. If they don’t think it’s a big deal, I hope they know just how big of a deal it is to us and how it reaffirms  the best in people.