Your Courageous Life

for the grinches

So maybe you’re thinking that Christmas is a Life Coach’s favorite season, like we and others of the positive-thinking ilk are just clip-clapping our hands with excitement come the Friday after Thanksgiving so that the holiday decorations can go up–maybe you even think it’s people like us who are responsible for decorations going up earlier and earlier each year. Maybe you just generally want to vomit at the thought of people doing things like affirming their worth or embracing themselves as powerful, and when you combine that with lots of talk of “Tis the Season” and holiday specials where people brave ice and snow to be together on Christmas and share lots of nice thoughts while sipping eggnog around the fire, it gets on overload. Maybe that’s the point where you purposefully bring Chinese food to the Christmas potluck where the hostess wanted everyone to bring “something they made themselves”–that is, if you don’t decline the invitation altogether.

Maybe that’s you.

It would definitely, absolutely, totally be me–if I weren’t invested in playing a different kind of game.

So I’ll start this the way we’d start a share at a recovery meeting: “Hi. My name is Kate. I am Holiday Aversive.”

“Hi, Kate.”

The holiday season is not my favorite time. I have what I believe are legitimate reasons for this, and to describe them, I’m going to speak from the place I was at, the place I can go to if I get a wee bit on the negative side of things–my inner snarck. So here goes.

One: it was a time when, during my childhood, my parents struggled the most around money. Two: A number of divorce/custody fights were centered around the holidays. Three: I hated visiting relatives who didn’t know anything about me, save what they learned on the holidays. I carried a lot of resentment that from my point of view, my family was totally drowning in anger and debt and unhappy muck, and despite all of the truckloads of tripe about “togetherness” and “family,” none of them had any clue what was going on. “Why pretend?” I remember arguing when I didn’t want to go. Four: Working in retail over the holidays and having people who theoretically wanted to give gifts in order to make other people happy turn around and make my life miserable when we were out of a size or they couldn’t find what they wanted. Five: Hearing that Same. Damn. Christmas. Tape. On. The. Gap. Sound. System. Every. Four. Hours. Six: Long lines, screaming children. Seven: Airports. Eight: Expensive flights. Nine: Ice-storms and canceled flights. 

And oh gee golly gosh huh-huh, my favorite! Number Ten! TEN: BEING TRIGGERED AROUND MONEY AND SPENDING TIME IN LONG LINES WHILE CHILDREN SCREAM TO SHOP FOR THINGS THAT PEOPLE DON’T REALLY NEED AND LISTENING TO THE REPETITIVE CHRISTMAS MUSIC IN THE STORES AND THEN SPENDING THE MONEY ON THE EXPENSIVE FLIGHT AND SITTING IN THE AIRPORT AND WAITING FOR THE PLANE TO TAKE OFF ALREADY…SO THAT I CAN FIGHT WITH MY FAMILY!

Ding ding ding ding! 

So, um, yeah. The holidays? They are not my favorite. If they are not your favorite, too, then let me tell you I can relate. Big time. Let’s just say I am still on my journey with the holidays, and part of my coping mechanism does in fact still involve buying enough toothpaste, deoderant, toilet paper and soap so that I don’t have to enter a Target from November 20th through January 3rd.

But okay–the whole point of doing the work that I do, aside from transforming myself from angry/bitter/grinchy because it’s a better thing for myself is to do it for the betterment of the world. Recently I was reading a book, Sacred Commerce, which was written by the founders of Cafe Gratitude. It’s about how to run a business in a way that is about meaning, but I think any tools there can also be applied to the larger “real world.” One that I particularly love was the tool of “making it a game.”

Something I’ve done these past few years because it gave me great joy was to make the holiday season an opportunity to love up every single cashier or helper person I run into. I remember what it was like to work at the Gap and have people treat me as…well, expendable. To be sniped at or have people act impatiently was really hard, as was just the general feeling of standing at a cash register for hours on end, listening to the Eurythmics version of Winter Wonderland (I believe that there’s only so many times one can hear that song on the sales floor before you are volunteering to please, please, please go down to the stockroom? To steam some button down shirts? Refold the denim by size and wash? Get down on the basement floor with a flashlight to scare away the cockroaches? Anything other than listen to that song one more time?).

But back to the point–I have made it my thing the past few years to try to avoid stores during the holidays, and if I do need to go to a store, to be really, really kind to the person who was helping me. To smile, to ask them in a really genuine way how their day was going, to do whatever I could to make a joke or lift their spirits. When I was on my feet for long shifts at The Gap, it was those people who were my lifeline, who reminded me that not everyone was going to yell at you if you could only find a pair of pants in a 12A, not a 12R.

This year, I’ve decided to “Make it a Game.” Make it a game to see just how much I can give kindness to the people I’m running across. This is something that I can do to divert my attention from that guy on the highway–you know, the one with the Christmas wreath in the back of his car and the bumper sticker asking what Jesus would do?–who just about ran me over and then laid on his horn and gave me the finger during the holiday season. 

Also, I’m Making it a Game to laugh at that sort of behavior, because it’s actually really, really funny if you think about it. One of these days I will mine the brain for tidbits about working at The Gap and write about it  (at least, I can’t remember signing an exclusivity clause…).

But just in case any of my fellow grinchies think I’ve gone off the deep end and am now “going over to the other side,” I’ll offer up that I don’t think I’ll ever truly be someone who’s into the Christmas spirit if this is my favorite Christmas tune of late (warning…crass content with that link).

So this goes out to my fellow people who are less than thrilled about the holidays. How do you cope? What do you do to make it a more powerful experience?