“When I’m worried and I can’t sleep I count my blessings instead of sheep, and I fall asleep counting my blessings.”

I love that song.

You probably know it. Written by Irving Berlin and sung by Bing Crosby in the movie “White Christmas,” it’s a mellow reminder that things could be worse.

The movie, out right about the time I was born, was more famously timed to recall the recently-ended Second World War, during which so much was lost.

Every year at this time, this song starts up in my head.

“When my bankroll is getting small I think of when I had none at all, and I fall asleep counting my blessings.”

When I returned from a failed work trip to England, I counted my blessings. I had $500 to my name, nowhere to live, no plan even how I would get from Kennedy Airport to Danbury, Connecticut, where my closest friends lived. I had been able to let only one person know I was, at last, being kicked out of the U.K. As someone who was supposed to work there, I learned the hard way that working in a foreign country – and staying – is in the details. And the paperwork. My employer hadn’t done it and that was that. I unexpectedly spent two and a half glorious months on a sheep farm with the family of a college friend, which turned out to be a blessing.

But now I was being deported.

I was the last person on that jumbo jet out of London. The immigration officer handed my passport to a stewardess and said, “Give this back to her when you are halfway over the Atlantic.”

The couple next to me looked nice. I introduced myself. They told me they were from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

I don’t remember the flight. What I recall is that at Kennedy I was the first person off the plane and there to greet me was the one person who knew I was coming home.

It was a blessing.

I was still staying with that friend in Connecticut when my father called on a Sunday morning.

My father never called.

Mom had a stroke, he said.

“Do you want me to come home?” I asked.

“Well, Honey, if you’re busy, no,” he said. “But if you’re not, it sure would be nice to see you.”

If I had still been in England, I would not have gotten that call.

It was a blessing.

If I had not known what it was like to have just a few bucks to my name, I probably wouldn’t have responded the same way to the homeless person in New York on my way out of the Matisse exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art months later. He asked me if I could spare some money for the train. Then he held up a platter of food, explaining that he and his wife were homeless, but had at last gotten a meal and a tip of the shelter where they could stay. It was a train ride away.

I don’t recall how much I gave him, but I do remember his response: “Oh thank you!” he gushed. “Would you like some of this food?”

I declined. And I remember saying, “I know what it’s like to be without.”

It was a blessing.

This week, I read a story in the New York Times about a man named Curt Bloch, a German Jew who spent more than two years living in a crawl space with two other people to escape the Nazi genocide of World War II. It was titled: “He Made a Magazine, 95 Issues, While Hiding From the Nazis in an Attic.”

The Dutch people who hid him not only provided for his living needs, but gave him the tools to produce the pocket-sized “The Underwater Cabaret,” a weekly magazine that was circulated by hand. It mocked the Fuehrer. And Goebbels.

He made only one copy of each issue.

Tiny, to be portable.

And secret.

Curt Bloch survived the war. Most of his relatives did not.

He was blessed.

“So if you’re worried and you can’t sleep just count your blessings instead of sheep, and you’ll fall asleep counting your blessings.”

Jane Curtis is interim editor of the Daily Freeman-Journal.