It’s Christmas and What you Should be is Present

It’s Christmas morning. Your plump, six-year-old fingers reach across mounds of boxes and bags, towards the one green and red present you’ve been dying to unwrap for a month now. You’ve spent all of this frosty December aching to peel back the edges of the enemy wrapping paper, to tear off the tape, the cardboard boxing, to finally sink into the ecstasy of uncovering your long-awaited, top-of-the-list gift. You’ve never been happier. You thank your mom, your dad, you thank Santa Claus especially, and you swear this will forever be the best day of your life.

It’s three days later, and the joy of that Christmas morning still tingles on the tips of your fingers and toes. Three months later, and you can hardly remember that morning, let alone the toy you spent so much time dreaming of. What did you and your family do for the rest of the day? Were they as happy as you were?  When it comes to Christmas gifts, it is often the suspense of future joy that makes the toy seem so golden and glittery. After the initial rush of heart-pounding adrenaline, the excitement of that shiny toy wears off, and you’re left with a sour taste in your mouth and a sense that your house full of toys has never been so empty. So, I beg the question, is Christmas joy fostered entirely by excitement, anticipation, and suspense? Would you love the holiday so dearly if you knew there would be no presents beneath your tree?

As a culture, we love our “things”. I’m as guilty as anyone – my heart simply melts when I find that perfect blouse or that vintage-style mug, and I can’t help but feel compelled to spend money on these items, as if my happiness were woven into the threads of designer shirts, or painted onto the porcelain of overpriced coffee cups. But if there were an equation, some way to calculate the kilojoules of joy that a person derives from a material item, how high do you really think that number would be? Would it match up against the magnitude of memories and moments?

Materials, toys, clothes – we’re taught to value these things, by a culture whose foundation in commercialism and economic gain is perpetuated by the media and by our peers. We exist as a society because of materialism; without the need to obtain more stuff than everyone else, better stuff, newer stuff, this wouldn’t be America. However, I believe that there is a way to meet in the middle, to find a balance between materials and moments. Toys break, clothes shrink, and technology changes faster than we can keep up with, but memories, feelings, emotions – these are perpetual. So, this Christmas, I urge you to treasure the time you spend with your family, notice the weather and the shapes of the clouds, and look forward to a lifetime of small, fleeting moments, strung together with people who matter.