The number of Christmas cards arriving in my mailbox this year is small. I guess people just don’t know what to say. Who can blame them? I didn’t know what to say myself, and I just don’t like sending out the card without a little personal, handwritten note. So my batches have been few and far between. Batch two went out in yesterday’s mail and I still have to hit my side of the family.
Then there is the shopping. Somehow, I lost momentum on that. I forgot some of the key items that seemed so obvious before and have since slipped my mind. I fear that on Christmas morning it will look like Santa forgot to visit.
I’ve tried to limit my shopping to pretty much the immediate family. It’s hard to do that when gifts start arriving on you desk at work each morning. I take a deep breath and remind myself that I can’t take on the added pressure of finding a small gift for my co-workers in my department. I just don’t have the energy.
Yet I had every intention of bringing a little gift for my friends in bereavement “group.” My plan was to give the girls pretty journals that they could use to write in. I thought that perhaps they could use writing as a healing, as I do. I’d visited the journal section at Borders Books, but none of the options appealed to me. So, in my pickiness, I left without buying anything at all and arrived at group empty handed. To my surprise, I was the only one empty handed. They had all found the time to find the perfect gift for me. What was my problem?
How is it possible to walk in and out of so many stores and still not buy a thing? I just don’t feel the holiday spirit. There is no joy of giving this year as I can’t seem to find any gifts that give the message I want to give. I want my gifts to say, “I see you for who your are” and because of that “I found the perfect gift.” Instead, I sneer at the package carrying people with anger.
I, like the Grinch who stole Christmas, often view the world as if they were the Whos down in Whoville (an endlessly cheerful bunch bursting with holiday spirit), and have become so sickened by their joy in the season that I barely fall short of hijacking the holiday from those that I care for most. I know this isn’t me. I try to avoid all Grinch-like actions; however I fear that I have been predisposed to the manifestation of these tendencies. I desperately want to be more like Cindy Loo Who than the Grinch. Then I remember that even little Cindy was searching for the “true meaning of Christmas.”
Dr. Seuss once explained, “… the Grinch in my story is the Hero of Christmas? Sure… he starts out as a villain, but it’s not how you start out that counts. It’s what you are at the finish.” I’ve got four days to make the transformation from villain to hero – four days to find that true meaning of Christmas.