Mark Pope shares Christmas traditions, how he practices gratitude

This will be a special Christmas for Mark Pope and his family as they celebrate their first holiday in Lexington since he took the job as Kentucky’s head coach. Pope’s gratitude for the job and passion for the program is evident in everything he does, to the point that when he was asked to rate his gift-wrapping skills on last night’s call-in show, he couldn’t help but agonize over his team’s loss to Ohio State in the CBS Sports Classic.

“Oh, man. So you know what? So if we’re talking about the Ohio State game, I’d rank [my gift-wrapping skills] as an F. Man, it pained me to leave BBN with that gift. That was not what we intended.”

Pope continued on to say that he thinks his daughters and Lee Anne would give his “insane” gift-wrapping skills an A — even if he uses too much tape. When will they open those gifts? Pope wasn’t quite in the mood to talk about Christmas traditions during his postgame conversation with Tom Leach on Saturday night, which the two joked about last night.

“Yeah, that’s the part I was like, ‘We’ve got to burn that part of the tape,'” Pope quipped. “It usually takes me like — I’m trying to be better in those moments, but boy, those are hard for me, man. It’s just like, oh, your just heart is ripped out.”

Three of Pope’s four daughters are in Lexington, the exception being Avery, who is currently on a mission in El Salvador. The family will spend Christmas Eve together, along with any of the players who didn’t return home for the short holiday break.

“We’ll all spend Christmas Eve together,” Pope said. “A quiet Christmas Eve. Occasionally, when things work out like they sometimes do, we’ll have some of the guys over if there wasn’t a way for them to get home, and we do very traditional things. Have a nice Christmas Eve dinner, read the Christmas story from Luke Chapter 2, and share some good times, play some games, and then open one traditional present and send everybody off to bed.”

Pope’s Gratitude Journal

More than once this season, Pope has preached the importance of gratitude. The team regularly holds gratitude circles in which they share what they’re grateful for, a practice Pope carries through in his daily routine through journaling, prayer, and even conversations with his family around the dinner table. Pope said that he could talk about gratitude for hours, but kept this message to just a few minutes.

“I’m such a believer. I just think, you’ve heard me say this over and over, but you can’t be more happy than you are grateful. I actually think that’s really, really true. I think that an entitled life leads to frustration and misery, and a grateful life leads to joy. It just does.

“So I think it’s actually something that we practice. We actually keep gratitude journals every night before we go to bed. Just write down three things that you’re grateful for. If you’re blessed enough to sit around a dinner table with your family at night, go around the table and just have everybody say what they’re grateful for. Do it once a week, do it once a month. If you’re a prayerful person, make sure to include and start your prayers with all the things that you’re grateful for.

“There’s so much for us to be so insanely grateful for. We just actually have to look; we just have to see it. And if we don’t consciously see it, we can go days and days and days missing it. And it’s where joy comes from.

“I could advocate this for the rest of forever because I just think we all are so blessed in our lives — and that doesn’t mean lives are easy. That doesn’t mean we’re not in the middle of the storm. It just means that if you look, you could find so many incredible things to be grateful for, from the simplest things to the most intensely complicated.”

Pope encouraged fans to hold their own gratitude circles at the Christmas dinner table; you might be surprised by what you hear.

“Take a minute. It’s fun. I’m telling you, I love hearing my guys, when we get in a gratitude circle, I love hearing what they’re grateful for. I love hearing what they’re thinking about. It might seem like it’s forced and it might seem a little uncomfortable, but it’s worth it and it’s magic and it’s really important.”