A creative and decorative way to reward yourself for your hard work and remind yourself that good things can, and do, happen.

Tossing some of your loose change into a coin bank every day is a great way to almost effortlessly save up some extra cash. You’re only putting in a few yen (or whatever your local currency is) at a time, but over the course of a year, you’ll end up saving enough to treat yourself to at least some sort of modest reward.

But Japanese Twitter user @mochiomochi_22 recently shared a way to gradually save up not only money, but happiness too.

All last year, whenever something good happened in @mochiomochi_22’s life, or when she worked hard to make something good happen herself, she wrote it down on a piece of origami paper. Each time, when she was done writing, she’d place a coin in the middle of the paper, wrap it up, and put the bundle in a jar.

12 months later, she’d amassed a total of 535 happy moments, so many that she actually had to pick up a few new jars along the way. Finally, at the start of the new year, she opened up the jars and reread the pile of joyful memories, and also recollected the coins. “I’m going to buy myself something tasty to eat,” she tweeted, along with “Thanks for all your hard work last year, me.”

▼ @mochiomochi_22 got both the beautiful origami paper and the cute jars from 100 yen shop Daiso, making the project clever and inexpensive.

@mochiomochi_22 was quick to mention, though, that she didn’t come up with the idea on her own. She was inspired by a tweet sent out by another Japanese Twitter user, @choss_bun, who’d shared the idea a year prior to when @mochiomochi_22 started.

▼ It’s sort of the reverse of the awesome “log-in bonus for life” idea that we looked at back in the summer.

Perhaps because of Japanese society’s emphasis on diligence and sacrifice, other Twitter users were quick to express how much they loved the message implied by these jars of happy memories: It’s important to do your best every day, but it’s also important to take the time to look back now and again and give yourself a pat on the back for all the effort you put forth. Online comments included:

“I’m going to try doing this in the new year!”
“What a positive way of thinking. I saw this tweet right at the start of the new year; it’s like a sign that I should start doing this too!”
“Even if you only put in one yen each time, you can still buy something really tasty at the end of the year. I love small luxuries like this!”
“This would be a great thing to have my kids do. We could have a shared jar for the whole family, and at the end of the year all get something to eat together.”

Any sort of wrapping method will work, but if you’re keen to follow @mochiomochi_22’s example exactly, the steps for the specific style of origami she used, called kamifusen, are outlined in the tweet here.

And of course, while having a few bucks to spend on whatever you like at the end of a year is a nice bonus, the real value here is in keeping a reviewable record of all the happy things, including the tiny ones, that occur in your life. Even if you don’t put any money into the jars, those little slips of paper serve as a physical reminder that good things can and do happen, and @mochiomochi_22 says that once she’s done rereading them, she plans to put the unwrapped papers into a scrapbook that she can flip through, which sounds like a great thing to have on your shelf to keep you smiling all year long.

Source: Twitter/@mochiomochi_22 via IT Media

Follow Casey on Twitter for more tiny things to be happy about.