Do you still do Christmas?

Written for a 12 step group

On a simple living forum the question was asked if the members still do Christmas? My response was: "Yes, I still do Christmas, but the difference in my life is that Christmas doesn't 'do' me any longer."

Many addicts lose sight of their recovery programs around the holidays. The very time they need their program most is the time that they do not make use of it. Crazy, isn't it...but, that is the addicts way. We seem to forget to put enough time in our program consciousness and instead put excessive time into thoughts of expectations, demands and complexities with our ever faithful friend of 'perfection' right by our side. Entitlement sickness is another pitfall for us. Are we entitled to get everything and do everything we want at Christmas as well as in life? No, we are not entitled to a thing in life except a peaceful and serene existence...if we work a good recovery program and are sober, abstinent, solvent and living within our comfortable means. Remember that expectations are pre-planned resentments. Looking towards perfection as our 'fix-all' is where many of us get lost instead of practicing gratitude and accepting of our comfortable means and abilities in life. Losing ourselves in perfection helps boost our ego and pride as well as provide a distraction to the unbalanced and painful life we have created for ourselves and our family. Giving ourselves over to acceptance and gratitude requires humility and faith and the way to do this is to start small and see that positive results can come about from changing the direction we have lived in the past. The law of opposites - go in the opposite direction from the one you have been going in for so long. (Provided of course, you are not satisfied with your current life and are looking for a new direction.)

The holidays are a signpost for me to be careful and I have to be on guard no matter which holiday it is, but for me the Thanksgiving - Christmas - New Years season up to January 6 can be the most treacherous. I make it a practice to stick extra close to my recovery programs and also try to relax more in my outside of program life as well. If your feeling stressed at this time of year try something new. What have you got to lose? You can bring pain back with ease if you miss it. Try scaling back, relaxing some and sticking close to your favorite support group. Try living well within your means, whether it be your financial means, mental means, physical means, spiritual means, recovery program means and comfortable space means. Make this year a year in which you consciously strive to do less and thus have more time to enjoy the holidays with less stress eating at you. Learn to say NO to demands, mindless rituals and people robbing you of your life. You are not recovering until you start refusing - as soon as you start refusing your sick past life you start recovering a new healthy one. Just producing more debt, more clutter and more fat only leaves you feeling sicker and depressed, so try another route this year. Going further down the wrong road will never lead to the right destination, you just keep getting further away from where you want to be.

For the last seven years I've had a very enjoyable Christmas season and hope this season will be number eight. Prior to this, I used to dread the holidays and really hated this time of year. You have to wonder what joy I could find in the holidays if I hated and dreaded them coming and couldn't wait for them to be over? Planning the 'perfect holiday season' requires one to live in the future a lot of the time. The future and the past is a common place for addicts to live in ... everyplace other than the present. After all, the present life is the life they have created for themselves and is not a pleasant one, so they get lost in hope for better times ahead or in reminiscing about the past. How much of our life is wasted by living in the future. We need to balance the future and the past with the present to live healthy lives, but need to be aware of how much of our supposed happiness is being put on hold until some future date that never seems to come. This is what fuels the 'Cult of Next' - you know - I'll be happy when I graduate or happy when I lose my weight or happy when I get my new car or happy when I move into my new house or happy when I find a new wife or happy when I take my vacation. We postpone our happiness until tomorrow.

Early in my recovery career, I read a post from an addict that wrote in how bewildered he was that his family had such an unhappy Christmas even though he had gone into debt to finance it and had bought such a giant tree that he could not fit it into the room unless he hacked a portion of it off. (Chevy Chase's movie "Christmas Vacation" comes to life!) He said that after the holidays the family split up and the wife left him. I guess there were more important things that needed addressing in his marriage other than "How big a Christmas tree can I buy?" This tells me two things: The first lesson is: "one thing, no matter how fine, only goes so far with giving a person a good life." The second lesson is: "when a mans mind is concentrated he is blind." If you have read my posts you will hear me repeating certain concepts over and over. This is because these are the simple concepts I use to recover with. I repeat them for two reasons; to plant seeds of recovery in others and to constantly remind me of their recovery importance. If we want to enjoy good recovery, we must be pointed in the direction of recovery at every turn throughout the day. Addictions never take a holiday or coffee break.

What I have just told you; "One thing, no matter how fine, only goes so far in giving a person a good life" and "When a mans mind is concentrated he is blind" cost me many hundreds of thousands of dollars to realize for myself. This is my holiday gift to you. Balanced living is much more valuable than unbalanced excessiveness, always remember that. As humans we tend to look towards 'the more the better' way of living life and get stuck in looking for inner fulfillment though outer possessions. With this false idea of happiness ingrained in us, we can naturally extend it to the holiday season. Addiction is always about excess and power. We take the good and turn it into the bad through excess. Now, this excess seems to be part and parcel for addicts as well as most humans. The difference is the normal people can stop easy enough when things get out of balance, but addicts cannot stop - addicts lack stopping power.

In my early days of online recovery, I thought that maybe the root of my holiday blues was caused by not spending enough money on them? Reading that addicts story of his holiday woes as well as recounting my own excessive spending experience got me wondering what is required for me to have a happy Christmas season if money was not the most important prerequisite? Over time, I could see that money was not the missing link to my happiness. In fact, the more money I frantically threw at trying to buy the perfect Christmas, the worse the holiday season was for me. Then it became clear that once the necessities of living were taken care of, that money had little to do with my holiday happiness or my happiness for the rest of the year for that matter. I had learned that joy is in us and not in things and that happiness is always an inside job.

We see some people get lost in lights and decorations of all sorts, excessive cooking, spending, alcohol consumption and other rituals of the holiday season. People nowadays seem to clutch onto the idea of 'perfection' and 'best' as a self image builder. After all if they own he best should they not be the best as well? Zig Zigler asked, "How many couples spend more time planning the wedding than they do the marriage? How many people spends more time planning their vacation than their lives?" If the perfect wedding or perfect vacation gets rained on, then they are devastated. They lost their hopes of reaching perfection, they lost their pre-planned happiness. They could try and practice mindfulness and grateful acceptance to find happiness in the moment and still have a good wedding or vacation; but if they have always looked for happiness in the future and have never found it in the present this will be hard to do. We can only really be at one place at a time. If we are not in the present we are not really living fully. As the book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness" says; "If while washing dishes we think only of the tea that awaits us...then we are not 'washing the dishes.' If we can't wash the dishes, chances are we won't be able to drink (enjoy) our tea either."

I had to learn to accept that I could not 'buy' the perfect Christmas, but I was able to 'make' a good Christmas for me and my family, irrespective of how much money I spent. The choice was always in me to have a nice Christmas as well as to be happy in life and this happiness was never dependent on the size of my bank account. A major breakthrough with enjoying the holiday season arrived as a pre holiday present for me many years ago when I picked up one of Elaine St. James little simplicity books and read what it had to say about simplifying life with my special attention pointed towards the dreaded upcoming Christmas season. I thought I would try something new and I officially joined the simple living movement. I now made a conscious effort to do less at the holidays and not more. Sometimes this translates into not so much less, just different uses of time and money. For an example, instead of ordering $340 of chocolate truffles from around the world by FedX and putting on 10 more pounds fat as I did the previous holiday season, I could spend some time with my wife walking in the snow and feeding the geese and ducks at the frozen over pond or relax and watch a Christmas video sipping some spiced cider. Other times it means cutting things out 100%, such as I do not put up outside lights or outside decorations, just a Christmas tree and a Santa needlepoint inside the house. Now I can have time to take my son skiing, tubing or snowshoeing or spend some time going to Christmas concerts. Whatever the choice is on how to spend my time and money, it is now my choice and not some pressured, unwanted choice that is heaped on me...and most important I now have time to relax and be mindful of my recovery programs needs.

In my previous life, I couldn't wait until the holidays were over so I could try to recover from the debt I ran up and lose some of the fat I put on. My thinking capacity was taken up with such worries, so how could I use my time to reflect on the season when I had no peace in my own life. Now I look forward to the holidays in their proper perspective and enjoy them without negative effects to my wallet or health. I do only what is comfortable for me and even try and do LESS each year. I know this does not go well with those suffering from 'Martha Stuart Syndrome' or the 'Cult of Next' but giving up those expectations of perfection helped me find peace with life again. I like to do good work, but perfection had to go if I wanted a new life. Anytime I start thinking perfection or outdoing others, it is a signpost for me that I am headed for problems in my life. With perfection you are always concentrated on and living in the future as your perfection requires great planning. Generally, people suffering from perfectionism have no peace. If you rate how good your holidays are by 'outdoing last years under the tree gift count' or 'outdoing the Jones's dinner party' or outdoing anybody or anything for that matter, your self worth is ego or pride based and is built on externals and not internals. As such, your self worth is artificial and not sustainable. Your self worth and happiness will be as elusive as a breeze. If you get something new you have artificial self worth for a day or two if you are lucky, but then it wears off, as all drug fixes do. Sometimes the high wears off when driving home from the store after a spending binge, but sooner or later you are off looking for another external to build your fix back up...the cult of next.

Most of my previous addicted life was lived in this world of the cult of next. All my self worth was purchased and I had little of my own true self worth. If someone had something that I perceived as better than I had I was envious and jealous and would set out to outdo them. You can see how shallow and unattainable a life this is. You can never come to a peaceful end, as someplace, somewhere there is someone with something better than you have and your self worth suddenly becomes deflated when this fact hits home. Suddenly your artificial self worth loses its luster...as your perfectionism is lost. Most important, this perfection we strive for when me make perfection our god lies outside our self; and so goes the self worth associated with it; as our self worth has little to do with our insides and everything to do with the rest of the world outsides. Many people fall into this trap of confusing their net worth with their self worth.

Where does my self worth come from?

My self worth is in how well each day I live within my means, comfortably fit within my space and gratefully accept my current position in life.

Once we can take our concentration off of everything we don't have and put it on what we do have we can develop much gratitude in life. Simple living helped me by cutting down on my unsatisfied demands and allowed me to be mindful in this area of all that I do have. When I put relaxation, contentment and happiness as my goals for a Christmas season I am a success. When I concentrate of commercialism, and trying to buy my happiness or outdo others as my goal for the holidays I fail. Learning to practice a program of grateful acceptance was required before I could find any peace. If I had little gratitude, my thoughts were always concentrated on what I didn't have. I became grateful and suddenly I could be thankful for everything I did have and had little time for being envious and jealous of others anymore. I had learned to accept my comfortable means and became grateful for the ability to live well within them. Now, I do have some nice material things in my life, as I seek to live a balanced life, but these things are not the foundation of my self worth. They were added after I had good, rooted self worth that could stand on its own. I also must have the real feeling that I can have or not have any of my possessions with equal ease. I had to develop 'a take it or leave it' mentality and be able to gratefully release any of them with a moments notice, otherwise I am a slave to people, places or things. Too much perfection, dependence and attachment in any one area whether it is clothes, houses, cars, interior design or even my body helps me become enslaved to it. Once I am enslaved I lose my peace.

A good test for self worth is this: take away a persons possessions, luxuries and material things and see how they stand on there own. If there is nothing left of self worth and happiness when the externals are removed, then it was all material based and artificially built. A person with true self worth can stand naked and still have their self worth intact. They may be a little chilly with no clothes, but they still possess real intrinsic self worth. How many times have we seen wealthy people commit suicide once they loose their fortune? All their self worth was artificial and locked up in the bank. Now that it is gone, there is no self worth inside them to fall back on...nothing left inside of them to live for? If you are ashamed of your body, then start there and build up a body you can be proud of; a body that is the best you can do with what tools you have to work with. Start from the inside out, not the other way around. Again, do not try and build a body like your dream idol has, build up a body that YOU can comfortably have. Remember, recovery is all about what YOU can do.

Success with any recovery program requires that we do not constantly stay on the edge of disaster, but allow us some breathing room for safety. If we are always on the edge with stress and problems, it is easy to slip off. We need to step back some and have a safety cushion from falling off and the holidays is notorious for slips so we must be extra mindful of our recovery work at this time of the year. Sure, I get overextended sometimes, but pull back when I see what direction I'm headed in. I work hard to live within my means and am mindful of what those means are; whether they be financial means, spiritual means, mental means, energy means, health means, ability means, stress means, recovery program means or my comfortable space means. I am reminded of a lecture I once heard from Thich Nhat Hanh, a famous Buddhist monk. He said that Buddha is represented sitting on a lotus flower as a symbol of peace and serenity. In contrast, many of us sit on hot coals and wonder why we have no peace. We have too many projects and things grabbing at us for peace. Instead of sitting on a lotus flower we are sitting on burning coals.

So, if you want to start afresh this year with the holidays and stop sitting on burning coals for a seat, you might tear down all the old rituals and complexities of this season and add them back on a one by one, invitation only basis after you have deliberated long and hard as to their true impact on you and your happiness. Remember what Thoreau wrote in Walden about possessions..."it is much easier to acquire possessions than to get rid of them," so it goes complexities and stress. They are much easier to acquire than to rid oneself of. I will not lie to you and tell you I am perfectly happy and perfectly serene all the time. (There is that word 'Perfect' again!) But I can honestly say that I am peaceful and serene most of the time as long as I am working my program, being mindful of the present, practicing grateful acceptance and working my recovery programs to the best of my ability. Yes, I am most content with my life. With peace comes happiness, as you cannot be happy without having peace and you cannot have peace without being happy.

I will leave you a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh and the way to peace.

"There is no way to peace - peace IS the way. This means that we can realize peace right here in the present moment with our look, our smile, our words and our actions. Peace work in not a means to an end, each step we take should be peace. Every step we take should be joy. Every step we take should be happiness. Are you massaging Mother Earth every time your foot touches her? Are you planting seeds of joy and peace? Enlightenment, peace and joy will not be granted by someone else. The well is within us and if we dig deeply in the present moment the water will spring forth. If we are determined, we can do it. We don't need the future. We can smile, breath fully and relax Everything we want is here in the present moment. Peace is every step...shall we continue our journey?"


Wishing You a Serene and Happy Holiday Season!