The Spirit of Christmas Present
While cycling to work through the frost laden air this morning, I couldn't help but be reminded of perhaps my favorite book at this time of year”A Christmas Carol”, by Charles Dickens. It's only a small booka short story reallyand yet it has survived the last hundred and fifty years or so through a multitude of adaptations. Many of Dickens characters are larger than life, and that's perhaps why his writing endureswe either see ourselves, or people we know in the characters and situations he wrote about all those years ago.
Perhaps my favourite part of the story happens when the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge the shadows of a Christmas in his youth, when his employerand a huge influence on him as a young manthrew a Christmas party on the last day of work;He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?It isn't that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.
The exchange between Scrooge and the ghost pretty much says everything about the way I view money, and very probably the reason I don't have much saved away anywhereand more importantly why I don't need much money. When I get in from work our youngest daughter typically runs up for a hug, before we all sit down to eat dinner together and share the stories of our day. Those few minutes were born out of tradition when we first had the children, but have turned into something much more.
Regardless of how we might feel, our ability to lift others through a smile, a hug, listening to the story of their day, or simply taking an interest in them is so much more powerful than any money we might give them.
I was taken aback yesterday while talking to a co-worker in his mid-twenties. He comes from a wealthy family, lives with his parents, and is incredibly entitled and outspoken in his views about most things. He made a comment boasting about the amount he and his friends spend on clothesa vulgar amountand seemed surprised when I gently mocked him for it. Inside I was seething that people can become so detached from the real worldthat they can lose sight of the most important things. On the way home I thought of so many cutting remarks I could have made, but then that would have made me just as bad as him.
Where am I going with this? I'm not entirely sure. Ah yesWhile cycling along through the shafts of sunshine this morning I was reminded that simple pleasures are often overlooked, and that Christmas affords us an opportunity to be nice to each other for no other reason than because “it's Christmas”. Given social graces, and the vagueries of social etiquette, it's good to have an excuse at least once a yearan excuse to tell people you care about them, to give close friends a hug, and for no ulterior motive to be suspected or attached.