The Christmas season can be the most challenging and telling time of the year. It is an accurate and unavoidable gauge of a person's satisfaction. Whether one wants to know does not matter. Christmas, like dying, is a mandatory self-evaluation of your satisfaction with your life. While dying is the final exam with no retake, Christmas is a practice test - a warning if one is not doing well.
Everybody is familiar with Dickens' story "A Christmas Carol". When it is taken seriously, as Dickens intended, the story is sobering and terrifying. Dickens' Scrooge learns his lesson, takes a good share of the satisfaction that was waiting for him and the story has a happy ending for all. Real life is harsher than this Dickens' tale. Satisfaction for Scrooge was always there for the taking. Scrooge only had to accept it.
In real life, satisfaction is not low hanging fruit. Sometimes Tiny Tim does not recover. Satisfaction is not a goose in a butcher's shop and we are not islands of self-contained satisfaction. Our satisfaction is the product of our relationships with friends and family. It is not who or what we are. It is what we have made with others and of others.
On the day of our final exam, it is another’s hand that we must find in our own – warm and comforting, holding tight with love. On Christmas morning count the people around your tree not the gifts under it. Is your Christmas a warning?
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