It’s Christmas, my fellow humans, so what would it look like if we did our very best to live with our beautiful hearts wide open tomorrow?

Yes, yes, yes. it’s inevitable. We’re going to get irked by those who always seem to trigger us the most. That’s what being a human being is all about. Especially at the holidays. Our feelings may get hurt. Others may fall very short of meeting the high expectations of who we think they should be for us based on our own point-of-view. Let’s face it. Christmas forces us into a corner of polite tolerance.

Here’s the million dollar question: What does Christmas really mean to you? We get to choose the meaning. More importantly, we have the opportunity to BE the meaning. So what does that look like?

Christmas can be a time to forgive, to appreciate, to grant mercy, to ask forgiveness, to stop judging and to accept others just as they are and expect absolutely nothing in return. And it’s a time to love. Above all else, it’s a time to love.

If we chose to be the living example of just one of these principles, the trajectory of our lives alters radically. It’s all a choice. It always is.

Christmas is a reminder of who we really are. And it’s an opportunity, a loving and grand invitation, to be bigger than who we’ve been being in the life we’ve been living, especially with those in our family.

Christmas is a check-point. It’s a benchmark for who we’ve been BEING with those with whom we share a genetic DNA code. It’s a time to choose if we want to be something different or not in the relationship we share with them. It’s always a choice. It’s a time to risk having our feelings hurt and not having to be right about the beliefs we’ve been clinging to about how things should be or the way things should go, or who our relatives should be for us and how they should interact with us.

The holidays make us feel vulnerable. Period.

Christmas spirit means having faith in something much bigger than ourselves, of that which is invisible to the human eye. It’s also a time when we come face-to-face with our humanity, our humaness.

To save the holi-day, we can remember what it was to be a child at Christmas-sky gazing, vigilant in the quest to be the very first kid in town to see a kind, generous, and benevolent Santa and his reindeer prancing across the night sky and to feel such joy over the anticipation of the wondrous gifts Christmas bestows. Child-like wonder is priceless. And it can also be a savior in our adulthood. Remember what it was like to be a child at Christmas and your view changes.

Tonight is Christmas Eve. We can rise above whatever it is that makes absent the spirit of Christmas. We can do this only if we choose to do so. It’s always a choice. Even when our spouses, partners, children, siblings, the cashier at the grocery store, the driver who flips us the bird, or our very own birth parents who seem as though they’ve been sent by Lucifer himself on a seek and destroy mission, we can find the perfection in the imperfection of the holiday muck upon us.

This is what it is to be a human. So deal with it the best you can. Tomorrow, be the very best version of yourself that you’re capable of being in the moment, and know I am doing the same.

But mark my words: Fly your heart out like a kite, and Christmas magic will surely be in the house.

Fa la la la la la la la la la!!

Merry Everything!