Video: With Contagious Laughter, Woman Tells Of 'Magical' Hug

FORT MYERS, FL — Before you do one more thing, watch this video filled with contagious laughter from a Florida woman as she describes why, overtaken by holiday exuberance, she hugged a complete stranger for a good deed he really didn’t perform.

“Well,” Mary Katherine Backstrom, a writer and mother of two, wrote on her Facebook page, “this takes the cake as the most embarrassing thing I’ve done this year.”

Backstrom can barely get the story out because she’s laughing so uncontrollably, but it seems she had been reading on Facebook about how people doing good deeds for others brings magic to everyone’s holiday season. So she decided to buy another customer’s ginger ale when she stopped in Wawa, a Fort Myers convenience store.

Backstrom went on a little tear in her video about how she can afford to spread joy by buying a ginger ale but not expensive Starbucks drinks, “like those other givers,” but the point is, she was still feeling all tingly and filled with the magic of Christmas when she got to the parking lot.

“It was a precious moment,” said Backstrom, clutching at her bosom and giggling, shrieking and crying her way through a Facebook Live video. “So I’m walking outside, I’m feeling this mindset that the holidays are so magical.

“I see this man,” she continued, again erupting into peals of laughter. “I see this man. He’s cleaning my windshield. …”

She was convinced that single act of buying a stranger’s ginger ale paid it forward far enough that, for no other reason than the selflessness of giving, a random guy had taken it upon himself to clean her windshield.

“And, so, I walk up to this man and I am like, ‘This is my favorite part of humanity I love at Christmas so much. Thank you for doing this,’ and I gave him a hug," Backstrom said in her thick, Southern drawl. "It wasn’t my car. He was parked in front of me, and he was cleaning his own windshield.

“And I told him I love Christmas and humanity. I gave him a hug,” she said. “I’m out here huggin’ strangers at the gas station because the magic of Christmas is so powerful.”

The man cleaning his windshield didn’t know what to think of Backstrom’s effusive gesture, and when she realized her mistake, she just walked away.

“Because what do you do?” she said. “I just go into my car and drove to a different parking spot so I could tell y’all about it.”

Backstrom’s laughter is contagious. Watch the full video below: