I'm not exactly sure when I've lost my Christmas spirit, but there's something about the season which no longer excites me. Maybe it's getting older, maybe it's the headache of trying to please people with gifts and having to come up with things to tell others to buy for me. I'm not sure, but I know that I am growing weary of it.
Sometimes I wonder what causes people to lose faith in things they formerly held dear, and what it would take for them to recapture their enthusiasm for those things. There seems to be a lot of this going on and I am always curious to know why. What is it that forces one to develop a different expectation from what they previously had?
We as a society have come to a point where the good old days don't hold the allure they once did, and as a result, we are forgetting that the measure of ourselves is a reflection of our experiences and our own personal history. We wall off those things from our history that seem to be necessary for us to develop our futures.
I was sorting through hundreds of pictures I have to put a few in albums and it dawned on me that there are things and people I have completely lost track of, times captured on film of which I have little recollection of or why I took the photo in the first place. I saw faces of people I haven't thought about in years and wondered what it was in their smiles that made them a piece of my past. It makes me want to go back and relive those moments, just so that I can recapture the feeling that I had, and what I have taken from it to apply to today.
I have found that I am constantly making the same kinds of mistakes today that I made with other people in years past, so I must not be learning my lessons very well. I need to change what I do and how I do them in order that I don't lose the lesson to the gray mist of the past. Once I can conquer that, only then can I move on and be happy with the world I live in today. It's hard and takes an enormous amount of will, but it's not impossible and it's certainly worth it, if I ever want to begin to catch up to and see the realization of the life I thought I would have so long ago. Maybe then, I will stop longing for a quick, quiet end to the holiday season and can embrace it and carry it with me through the rest of the year.
They say that Christmas is a time of love, when we show to others what they mean to us, and that to give is far better than to receive. Maybe we need to focus in on what people mean to us the other 51 weeks of the year and find out what makes them dear. Only then, might we be able to see what makes us content and our lives worth living. It is worth the trip to our past, in order to be able to move into the future without regret.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukah...