Holiday Blues

We have holiday blues because we have too much hope for life, too lofty of an expectation for joy and, instinctively, we know that this coming holiday season will bring more disappointment than excitement, like all the other ones in the past. Yet we continue to wait eagerly for the coming of Christmas and the New Year, thinking this season will be entirely different.

Things that cause us to have great hope and never fail to disappoint us in the end are not the best things in life. They are secondary at best. Therefore we continue to wait for the best thing to arrive in our life, and many of us will die waiting.

The key to our happiness in life is not to have such great expectations. Well, to be more exact, not to stake our happiness on secondary things and learn to explore the best things that brings us true joy. We need to cultivate our talent for happiness by searching for joy among the common things during ordinary days. If we wait until a holiday to be happy we probably won’t find it.

When I was a child, it was such a depressing feeling after I spent the last dime that I had received in my Chinese New Year “red envelope” It made me wonder whether it was worth it, because the feeling of disappointment seemed to outweigh the excitement of receiving the money. Yet I continued to wait for the coming of Chinese New Year, year after year, believing things would be different every year, though they remained the same.

I have since found a good solution. I have tried to make everyday a Christmas, a Chinese new year, and a red-letter day. If life is a gift from above, we don’t have to set aside a special day during the year to have a great celebration, do we? It’s akin to opening up a gift when I look at the sparrows feeding in the birdfeeder outside of our dining room window and the joy it brings may be one of the best things in life. Our life will be filled with unspeakable joy if we consider each day of our life God’s gift, loaded with colorful packages of goodies waiting to be opened. How can we not be overcome with euphoria when we unwrap the glorious gift of the sunrise every morning? The only reason that we don’t is because we don’t think it is a gift from God. Without realizing this, your life will become “always winter, but never Christmas.”