After the business and hustle and bustle of the holiday season, I had a lot of time to think. There were a few events that happened in my life and household that made my life a bit stressful, and after everything was said and done, I was exhausted and definitely a little bit sad.
The holidays can be a crazy, busy, stressful time. We are decorating, shopping, wrapping, baking, cooking, cleaning and preparing. Trying to be prepared for any and everything. We run ourselves ragged trying to make sure everything is perfect. My question is: Why do we do this? Think about it. Think about the amount of preparation. All of the decorations that were meticulously placed so that they could be up for a few days and then the hours spent taking them down and packing them away for another year. The gifts that you spent hours shopping for and wrapping so beautifully that are torn apart in a matter of seconds. The hours spent preparing a meal that is consumed in minutes. When all is said and done there is almost a depression that takes over. A sadness that things are now getting back to ‘normal’.
On the other side of that, there are those who don’t bother with any preparation whatsoever, and they do whatever they can to avoid Christmas activities completely. I can’t tell you how many times over the last month or so I heard this statement uttered: “I fricken hate Christmas!” There’s a lot of reasons that people despise this holiday. One of the most common being the stress that it brings due to all of the things I just talked about. Some people hate the consumerism that it brings out in our society. There’s a lot of talk about how we have forgotten the ‘reason for the season’.
The thing that comes to mind for me, in both of these scenarios, is magic. Why is it so important to some of us to put together the perfect Christmas? It’s because of the magic. Think back to the magic that Christmas brought you as a child. I think that when we become adults, we are still trying to create that magical feeling for our children and our grandchildren. But I also think that a part of our adult selves is trying to hang on to that magic for ourselves. Trying to find it, to recreate that feeling for the child that still lives inside of us. When we grow up, we have so little magic in our lives. Christmas is a time that we can pretend that we believe in it again, even if it takes weeks of work to experience that magic for just a few days, or even just a few hours. For those who claim to ‘hate’ Christmas, I think its because they’ve not only lost the magic, but they’ve forgotten what it feels like altogether.
I think that Robert R. McCammon sums it up quite well in his book: Boy’s Life:
“…we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires and comets inside of us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out washed out and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake.”
To put it bluntly, life drains us of our magic. We become so focussed on doing what we are told, doing what is expected of us, that we completely forget how to dream. We become so driven towards what we should do that we forget what we can do. We lose ourselves in what we think others expect of us and we forget what it is that we want; what our soul needs. We lose our sense of wonder when looking at the world and we become cynical and logical and un-magical. We become ‘grown ups’.
Times like Christmas allow us to live vicariously through children’s excitement, or to have an excuse to be a child ourselves, even if just for a little while. The really interesting thing about this, is that we are so conditioned to live according to society’s standards that most of us don’t even realize that what we are missing is the magic. We don’t realize it because we don’t believe anymore, even though deep down inside we really want to. Admit it. When Peter Pan tells you that Tinkerbell is dying because no one believes in fairies anymore, and that you need to clap your hands to show that you believe…you really want to clap your hands, don’t you? In the movie Elf, when Santa needs Christmas spirit to make his sleigh fly and everyone starts singing, Santa Claus is Coming To Town, you were singing too, or at least humming.
What if we could bring this magic back into our lives on a day-to-day basis, and not try to stuff it all into one holiday that happens once a year. What if we didn’t need to use an annual holiday as an excuse to feel like a kid again? You really don’t, you know. You just need to change your way of thinking and learn to be present.
A lot of us make New Year’s resolutions like, “I’m going to quit smoking, I’m going to lose weight, I’m going to work out every day.” These are all good resolutions. But these are also common, everyday, expected kinds of resolutions. This year, try to think outside the box. Try things like: “This year I’m going to find something positive in every day. This year I’m going to find something to be grateful for, every day, no matter how small. This year I will encourage myself to do something I’ve always dreamed of doing, no matter what other people have to say. This year I will learn to love myself.” Write them down, repeat them to yourself every day. Focus on noticing the wonderful little things that happen every day, the things that we usually take for granted. Think a little bit less about what others expect and more about what you want. Learn to look at the world through the eyes of a child again. I promise you that as you begin to think and live in the positive; to look for the magic in every day, you will see a change.
So, clap your hands, sing the songs, talk to the fairies…find your magic again.
Much love,
Sandy