Ghosts of Christmas

Dear reader, Christmas has always been special to me. It means carols and festive cheer and laughter and presents and family. Being a quarter-German, my family opens our presents on Christmas Eve. When we’re at home, my mother roasts a goose. Sometimes it’s stuffed with other birds, but it’s always filled with the most incredible foie-gras stuffing. My grandmother’s family recipe.

Whenever there is a young kid present, someone always dresses up as Santa. Towards the end of dinner, the assigned Santa goes around the back of the house to ring his jingle bells and cry out “Ho Ho Ho!” As the kids go running out to see Santa, the presents are quickly placed under the tree; the milk and cookies left half eaten by the “reindeer”.

I’ve been Santa a bunch of times, and had to run away from kids that seem to get faster each year while clutching a pillow at my belly stuffed into my Santa suit with one hand and that floppy oversized hat with another.

Christmas has also always been a time of melancholy. I’ve often wondered why. Perhaps it’s the indelible mark of the passing of yet another year. A time to reflect upon what I’ve done: my achievements; my failures; my regrets; my gratitude. But also upon those magic moments of grace that always surround me, if only I’d pause for a moment from the headlong rush of life. To take a breath. To notice the collateral beauty colliding endlessly around me.

But my favourite day of the whole year, by far, is always New Year’s Day. That first, crisp morning. The streets are always quiet; revellers finally tamed by the rising of the sun. It’s a morning without the usual tension of people bustling about their business, always trying to get somewhere, instead of remembering to be.

It’s a morning of endless possibility.

For the past couple of years I’ve been blessed to spend New Year’s with some of my closest friends. And each year we take some time to reflect on what has been, and to plan for what we hope will be.

A better tomorrow.

The ancient Chinese philosophers always believed that the difficulty in morality was rarely in determining what “the good” was: it was in actually doing it. Intuitively, we all know this. We almost always know what we should be doing, but somehow we fail to actually do it. It’s like that scene in a horror movie, when the young girl decides to go down alone into the basement to check out those noises, and you say to her: “Don’t do it!” But of course she goes anyway.

It doesn’t always have to be this way.

In Charles Dickens’ story A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is a cold-hearted miser who despises Christmas. He’s miserable: so much so that his very name is used today to describe unhappy folk. Until one night he’s visited on Christmas Eve by the three Ghosts of Christmas: Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come. They show him what will come to pass if he continues living the way he is. Scrooge finds the pain of that realisation so intolerable that he vows to change, if only given the chance. And of course, he wakes up to find that it is still Christmas morning, and he has that chance after all.

You can use that same leverage on yourself. We all have things about our lives that we want to change. But wanting is not enough. We must link massive, unbearable, and immediate pain to having things stay the same, and link massive, extraordinary, and immediate pleasure to doing the things we already know we “deep down” want to do.

Ask yourself: what has living the way you have in the past cost you? Cost the people around you? What have you lost because you’ve refused to change?

Ask yourself: what has living this way cost you and the people you care about in the present?

Ask yourself: what will living this way cost you and the people you care about one year from now? Five years from now? A decade from now?

Dickens Process, Tony Robbins

So instead of setting trivial New Year’s Resolutions this time that will be forgotten by the second week of January, I ask you to try this instead. Take a moment over Christmas to reflect on what has been. On how lucky we all are to have this day before us. Who knows how many more we’ll get. And take a moment on the morning of New Year’s Day to think about what you truly desire. What could you do in this next year that will have deep meaning for you when you look back upon it years hence? It could be something that will one day make you burst with pride; or just something that will make you smile a little.

Yours Sincerely,
Henry Chong