The Secret to Happiness

It’s officially Christmas.

Christmas has been sneaking its way in through the backdoor since the back-to-school shopping season but now there’s an unapologetic full-court press to ring up and swipe in the next big shopping holiday. Retailers have even brought back the layaway as a convenience for all us consumers who don’t have enough cash to buy Christmas all at once. (By the way, if you can’t cash-and-carry the presents you’re buying to give as Christmas presents, you may have missed the point.)

As is tradition, my wife and I have set a dollar limit for the gifts we will give each other. I think we may even start a new tradition and keep to that dollar limit.

I know people who’ve already decorated their homes for Christmas. I don’t mean the confused people who leave their lights up all year. I mean, they’ve actually set up trees with ornaments and decorations and presents. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was Christmas Eve in their living rooms.

Christmas’ arrival wasn’t really real for me until I was walking through our local mall and saw… Santa Spot. I couldn’t believe it, but there it was in all its redness. All it was missing was a drunk, smelly pervert in a bad costume pandering to the parents of thousands of whiny, snobby brats. (NOTE: The real Santa at the Downtown Macy’s is excluded from this description. Macy’s is where Santa hangs out when he’s in Portland. The best parents get to take their wonderfully well-behaved children to spend time with the real Santa. And since Macy’s took over Meier & Frank, they even remodeled Pottersville in to a real nice Santa Land with elves and reindeer and stuff.)

And I get it. Retailers need to generate excitement and pump up the shopping season to increase quarterly earnings. (Actually, our economy could use some good news from retail this quarter!) And my friends really like Christmas. It’s fun. The decorations are better than any other holiday’s. They get to feel that Christmas spirit for a month-and-a-half instead of three weeks. It’s something to look forward to. I think y’all are nuts, but I get it. Christmas allows us to be dreamy-eyed kids who believe in magic and run wishing to good and make a difference.

But for all the good and magic of Christmas, I love Thanksgiving. If for no other reason than, when else can we eat our body weight in carbohydrates and fats without guilt or shame? It’s a good day. I’ll start my Thanksgiving off watching the Macy’s Day Parade with the girls. Once we eat breakfast and get bored of giant balloons, we’ll get ready for the annual Turkey Bowl. Hopefully the field’s muddy. After pounding my friends and family in the ground with my superior athletic ability and knowledge of football strategy, we’ll have a light “lunch” of cheese, crackers, and meat, chips and salsa, veggies, including of course, black olives. The only thing better than watching a kid run around with black olives on their fingers is if they can flip their eye lids up and run around laughing so hard they nearly pass out from asphyxiation. Someone’ll have too much cheer and either get nostalgic or belligerent.

Right about the time we’re ready to pick straws to figure our who we’re gonna eat first, Grandpa will decide the turkey’s done. The fixins’ll be set in place. Someone, probably me, will say grace, and a sense of fulfillment will settle over the crowd. Grandpa will begin his, “I’m thankful for…” monologue that makes everyone a little uncomfortable wondering if he’s gonna start kissing or crying. And the day moves to a nice slow auto pilot of games, movies, food, naps, and Tums. What a day!

Not everyone’s Thanksgiving will be like mine. Some will be spent away from loved ones. They’ll be spent standing watch atop a tower in South Korea or clearing a mine field in Afghanistan. They’ll be spent in a hospital ER because someone had too much cheer and plowed into a family on their way home. They’ll be spent wishing they’d call or stop by. They’ll be spent wondering if anyone remembers when. They’ll be spent in a soup kitchen wondering where the next meal will come from. And for most people, the fourth Thursday in November will pass as any other day, not really caring that some legislative body decided that that was the day when the US remembered to give thanks that an Indian with an over inflated sense of charity sealed the death warrant of his people by showing some lost white guys how to raise corn.

It’s not the day I look forward to. Sure, we have a good time, and there are things we do that I enjoy, but my appreciation for Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the holiday. Thanksgiving is a reminder to be grateful for the blessings we enjoy. And they are many, far more than we can count or realize. Thanksgiving is the fist step to living a life of gratitude. Gratitude increases love. Gratitude increases appreciation. It helps us develop perspective. I cried and cried because I had no shoes until I saw the man who had no feet, a proverb goes. Gratitude is contagious. Showing gratitude is a law of the universe for true happiness, and it is something that truly people exude. Thankfulness and the act of expressing gratitude are the secret to happiness.

There is a real danger in forgetting to be thankful or choosing to not show gratitude. Have you ever done a favor for someone who took your action for granted? A lack of thankfulness shows a cavalier attitude towards that which we have received. We all owe everything to the God who created us and grants us our daily breath, and everything that has ever happened in our lives can be attributed to His granting it or doing it. For that reason alone, we should start off every day on our knees in thanksgiving, determined to make the world a little better.

Gratitude and thanksgiving engender a greater desire to serve. From service we receive blessings, and you don’t have to believe in a god to believe in that. Service is a drug, every bit as powerful as heroine, and once it has you, it is very difficult to pull away from. Blessings increases our feeling of thankfulness and desire to show gratitude and the vicious cycle of happiness keeps turning. It doesn’t matter where you get on. All that matters is that you stay on. And, to me, Thanksgiving is just another opportunity to remember all that has happened, all those that can be helped, and all that will happen because of simple ordinary efforts.

I don’t mean to offend or suggest that retailers have evil and people who decorate early are selfish and ungrateful. Decorate all you want. Sell as much as you can. Enjoy your Christmas as much as you can in whatever way you can. We all show our thankfulness in our own ways, and celebration and fashion are not my concern. Apathy is my concern and not even from you. Apathy is never achieved purposefully or all at once, and, on a personal level, it only serves to destroy the possessor. Many retailers and early decorates are very grateful and generous people just celebrating in their own way. But I’m concerned that, on a much larger scale, our community has become complacent and entrenched in entitlement. On a much larger scale, the darkness of apathy that will consume a soul, will consume a nation.

Americans are incredibly generous people. We’re also incredibly selfish. And unless we remember to be thankful, how can we really appreciate Christmas for what it is? So, don’t be in too big of a hurry to get to Christmas or maybe you’ll just be thankful when it’s over.