The Christmas Spirit

“I just don’t have the Christmas spirit,” she said and sighed.
“What does that mean?” I asked, trying to challenge her a little bit.
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “But whatever it is, I don’t have it. And I should.”
“You should, huh?” I asked. “According to who?”
Just then a car came by, headed in the opposite direction. Multi-colored lights dangled inside from the car’s ceiling. We laughed.
“That guy has the Christmas spirit,” I said.
Minutes later we turned down a side street and saw a stop sign wrapped in a pine garland. Maybe not as cool as the guy with the dangling Christmas lights in his car, but I still managed a smile. About a block or so later we saw an almost palatial brick home, draped with Christmas lights. Curiously, the display also included a neon palm tree along with a couple pink flamingoes. We chuckled at this “Christmas in paradise” theme.

I drove home and uncharacteristically didn’t turn on the radio or my mp3 player. It was just me and my thoughts. So my friend didn’t have this mysterious “Christmas spirit”, whatever that was. Did I? I couldn’t honestly say, because I didn’t really have a handle on what that was. I thought about the events of the past year or so… good things, bad things and maybe even some wonderful things. It was very easy for me, at least at that point, to make a case that I had pretty much had my ass handed to me by the events of the past few months.
I was almost home when another friend called me, responding to a voice mail I had left the day before. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and then I proceeded to tell him that a former co-worker of ours had just spent a few months in prison for a felony charge of “obstructing justice”.
“You know,” he said, and I could picture him shaking his head ruefully,”that guy’s gonna spend the rest of his life in and out of prison.”
I had to agree.

It was about 1:30am and I was about halfway through a “Walker, Texas Ranger” rerun. Despite the fact that I was tired to the bone, I simply couldn’t get to sleep. I flashed back to a conversation I had earlier that evening with another friend.
“I’m just going to hold on to some hope for a little while,” I said. “Maybe I need that right now.”
Ah-ha. That was it.
That’s the Christmas spirit. Hope. Even the more secular, cynical and jaded among us can choose hope.
Hope for the future.
Hope for our children.
Hope for peace.
Hope for happiness.
Hope for those who need it.
Christmas is the season of hope. That’s a gift you can give both to others and yourself.