Better Late Than Never: The Winter Holidays Are the Perfect Time to Weigh Our Priorities

We can ask ourselves how well we balance our work and family obligations. Yuganov Konstantin/Shutterstock

In Faith Moore’s “Christmas Karol,” a retelling of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” Karol Charles is a driven professional intent on raking in as much money as possible, ostensibly for the welfare of her family. The novel opens with Karol calling an emergency meeting of some of her law office staff on Christmas Eve, interrupting their holiday and neglecting the needs of her husband and two children.

As Karol’s Christmas ghosts of past, present, and future open her eyes to her sadly twisted priorities—she has also severely damaged her relationship with a beloved sister and grossly mistreated her secretary—she becomes a sort of mirror for readers, encouraging us to look in the glass and ask some questions. What do I value most in life? Do I judiciously order my priorities, balancing the obligations of work with attention given to family and friends? Do I keep the promises made to those I love?

And if not, is it too late to change, as both Ebenezer Scrooge and Karol Charles ask themselves?

The answer to that last question is a resounding “No!” Equipped with the desire and willpower to do so, it’s never too late to make changes, and the winter holidays are the perfect time to begin. Here are three features of the season that can help us reorder our priorities.

Gratitude

We’ve already kicked off these festivities with Thanksgiving. Many of us chowed down on turkey and all the fixings and even voiced our appreciation for what we have, but all too often our thank-you inventory disappears along with the pumpkin pie.

If, instead, we make a list of the people and things we’re grateful for on whatever day we choose, we have a visual of our priorities. If we’re satisfied that these priorities match the attention we render them, we let them stand. If, on the other hand, we put “my children” at the top of the list but spend our days working and our evenings watching television, then we either need to rearrange our schedule or admit that we’re deceiving ourselves. It’s this realization that helps bring about change.

The Testing Ground

For many people, December is the Daytona 500 month. We whip around the holiday track, decorating, shopping for gifts, making travel plans, and throwing parties so that when Santa Claus finally retires to the North Pole for another year, we’re in need of that “long winter’s nap” mentioned in “The Night Before Christmas.”

But this frenetic pace actually provides an excellent opportunity to keep an eye on that list we’ve compiled. Do we go to the holiday concert at our daughter’s school, where she’s performing a solo, or does the party at the office and getting acquainted with the new director of our department take precedence? Do we spend lavishly on gifts for family and friends, telling ourselves that we can make up the expenses with overtime in January, or do we spend more frugally, looking forward to winter nights with the family?

There are no absolutely correct answers to these questions, but the key is to practice awareness of our choices and of what matters most.

Drawing Conclusions

New Year’s Day rounds out this whirl and is, of course, the time when many of us make resolutions, such as shedding the pounds we’ve gained since Thanksgiving. This is also the ideal time to weigh another item on a scale, which is that list of priorities. How did we do? Did we try to make family more a part of our lives? Did we pay more attention to our spouse or to that friend that we’ve ignored?

Unlike Ebenezer Scrooge and Karol Charles, few of us will be visited by holiday spirits, at least not like the ones we find in these novels. But if we fail to change that which begs to be changed, someday we may find ourselves haunted by that other terrible ghost, “What Might Have Been.”

At the end of “A Christmas Carol,” when Scrooge wakens from his nightmares, he cries out, “The shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled.”

Scrooge dispelled those shadows. So did Karol Charles.

And so can we.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.