Blog / Finishing Well

“Goodbye Christmas… Goodbye New Years… Goodbye sanity!”

That’s actually what a friend of mine said to me this past weekend when I merely asked him, “How were your holidays?” In fact, he admitted that he says that every year. When I asked him “why?”, he didn’t even take a breath before he blurted out, “Because it’s so true and it helps bring me back to reality from what the world does to me at this time every year!”

I thought to myself, “Wow, he’s right. But at least he’s honest.”

Then my next thought was, “Maybe that’s what I need to do now that we are into January 2015. I need to come back to reality.”

You may think I’m weird (many already know that), but there’s something I do every Christmas. Every single year. And I get the same result every year.

About three weeks before Christmas, at the beginning of “Advent” (you can tell I was raised Lutheran, which was a really good thing), I’ll be driving in my car listening to the radio or passing a billboard sign or shopping in a store, and I will play a little game I invented years ago. I pretend that I have never ever heard of Christmas before. (I told you I was weird). I try to imagine that I came from another planet and that this is the very first Christmas I have ever experienced. And then, I look and listen to everything around me and I begin to ask myself this one key question: “So…what’s the real message of this holiday we call ‘Christmas’? What’s all the hype?”