It’s A Wonderful Life
We shop, we party, we trim the tree. We put up the decorations, send the cards and mail the packages. We eat, drink, and spend too much.
We do many of these so-called festive things because we think we have to, not because we really want to. We go on automatic pilot. We act out of some unnamed sense of obligation, a vague feeling of guilt, an anxiety that something will go wrong if we don't keep up with the rituals, or the traditions, or the joneses.
The holiday season provokes these insecurities and many more. The holidays tantalize us with the promise of a kind of ideal connection to family and friends, often stirring up a nostalgia of something that never really existed. We secretly long for the family gathering in which we will feel perfectly accepted. We secretly hope that we will feel loved because someone knew just the right gift for us. We secretly worry that if we miss something then everything will fall apart.
In all the scurrying around to achieve some ideal, we often miss what we are really looking for. We often call it the holiday spirit. Fundamentally, the holiday spirit is really about peace of mind. And peace of mind doesn't come with achieving some kind of perfect state, it comes with realizing the goodness of the imperfect state that we are in.
The best holiday movies and stories have become classics because they are about real people engaged in nitty gritty life. And into this nitty gritty life, hope and love and peace are born. We discover that there is goodness in what was felt to be once a not so wonderful life.
Psychology Today
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