I’m not a betting person. If I were, I’d wager that December 26th is probably the biggest sales day for plastic containers. After all, the Christmas decorations have been up for at least a month at this point. That tree positioned a bit too close to the foyer, catching all the elbows and shoulders of those who enter, and the wreaths and the garland and the glitter that seems to procreate overnight now seem downright irksome after the 25th. We are done with festive holidays. It’s time to put away the wonder and pack away the joy and issue a yearly happiness postponement until Thanksgiving of 2022. And, we need new, shiny containers with working lids because someone threw away all the cardboard boxes. After all, January is somber. January is woeful. It’s time to mourn all the bad decisions of the holiday season. I spent too much money. I ate too much sugar. I drank too much eggnog. And now, I just want to make all the reminders of my less than perfectness disappear. Worst of all, it’s time for resolutions. Katie bar the door. It’s time to pay the piper. And, there’s no Mekhi Phifer. I just blew on my fingertips and rubbed them on my imaginary lapel. I deserve an award for that line.
Resolutions are evil. Depending on which morning show you watch, the stats vary with one commonality. People, between 60% and 85% of us, don’t do a good job of upholding their resolutions. Spoiler alert, it’s because we make sweeping, epic, larger than life promises to ourselves! We paint ourselves with the worst colors of paint. We look at our past year with such angry and disappointed eyes. Our hateful inner child mocks us. “Lose weight? As if. You’ve been making that resolution for a decade. Hasn’t worked out so far, huh.” “Save money? You can’t. You spend it like your wallet is on fire. Dream on.” “You think a vision board will help? You couldn’t cut out words for a ransom letter. What makes you think you can do a vision board?”
The bigger question is, why are we taking on a monumental task, like a year’s worth of goal setting, right after Christmas? The holidays are hard, especially for parents. Our kiddos’ memories are on the line. We plan and we cook and we buy and we worry. Boy, do we worry. We decorate and we call and we visit and we turn ourselves into pretzels to get to this relative’s house and that relative’s party. We split Christmas Eve and Day between 2, 3, 4, or more locations. It’s a holiday more packed with rushing and cleaning and apologizing than it is spreading the joy of the reason for the season. We tirelessly rally to the tree lightings and the school programs and the festivals. What we really wantis everyone on blankets in the floor eating popcorn and playing Monopoly, but there’s just no time. There’s never any time. Then, you wake up the morning after Christmas and, poof. It’s over. We are ever so tired. Yet, there’s so much regret and so much mess. Still, this is the time we hold our own feet to the fire of New Year’s resolutions? Indeed.
Goals are good. That’s how we make positive changes in our lives. But, this formula of throwing your life’s baby out with the bathwater every January is cruel and unusual punishment. Even our resolution voice is mean. We write “lose 20 lbs” which is code for “your body is disgraceful.” We make notations to, “stop spending money” which translates to “you aren’t allowed to have any fun.” There are difficult projects we command ourselves to finish that are accompanied by unrealistic timelines. By the end of our list, we’ve basically told ourselves that there is nothing good and salvageable about our very souls. We are but worthless scrap metal waiting to be crushed and mangled.
What if we refused? What if, instead of condemning ourselves to laundry lists of things we cannot do anymore, we made some sweet and genuine promises to ourselves. Instead of “give up sugar” we could commit to “fueling our bodies with healthier food” or “take more after dinner walks.” “Write a daily list of my positive attributes” sounds like a great idea, as does “volunteer occasionally.” Commit to reading a book on creative finance methods. Make a promise to go to 2 museums in 2022. Decide that Sunday dinner with your mom is a must for the new year. Make restorative sleep a goal. And, maybe, just maybe, focus on what you can do throughout the year to make Christmas in 2022 less utter chaos with more good will toward men. Also, go buy yourself some new plastic containers with lids that really work. That always makes me feel better. Let’s take that cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne, my dear. For auld lang syne.
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.