3 Gifts for Christmas

“This is the most wonderful time of the year”….. so the song goes. Bright lights everywhere, white snow on the ground, shops open until late and we rush around planning parties, attending gettogethers and shop until we drop! Even as we may complain about the craziness, we love it! People are less grumpy in the stores, less angry on the roads and overall it is “good cheer”! As we enter Christmas, we also enter into the year 2020 and in moments of quiet, we find time to reflect on 2019.  I want to challenge our readers during this time to consider the following 3 ideas.

We all love gifts and we all like feeling appreciated. What does true appreciation mean? Is it the gift that was bought or the thought that went into the gift? What does your gifts reflect on how you know the person you are gifting to? What is the message you are bringing with your gift? Is there relationship in your gift? So many times, we focus on the physical gift, but is it the gift we value or the relationship? Do we give others the gift of relationship? As I work with families who have special children, we frequently have to dwell on topics such as their task performance, their strengths, their challenges, their learning profiles. I frequently wonder if, amidst all the craziness of schedules and “catching up on delays”, we stop to think on how that child is perceiving life? Is life filled with the joy of living, or filled with schedules of school and therapists? No blame or guilt trip here, we have to do what we have to do as the future depends on it. But how much do we reflect on the child’s experience? How does the child view us as a mother or father, aunt or uncle? How much time is allowed for the natural relationships that teach  more about giving yourself than the giving of gifts? How much of your enjoyment of Christmas is about family time and how much is about the gifts? Give yourself and the family the gift of being together this Christmas and reflect on how this joy of togetherness could be perpetuated as a new years’ resolution for 2020!

Find a moment to sit still and reflect on all your friends and family. Who has had a particularly “bad” year in 2019? Who do you feel guilty about not spending enough time with? Call that person and gift yourself and your time to a coffee date or lunch date and simply listen. Open the door for that person to reflect and gather themselves for 2020. Give the gift of hope through the giving of your time and listening ear. Focus on the person, not the gift you may bring. Make that person feel worthy of being listened to.

Lastly, gift yourself this Christmas! So many consultations I have contain tears of worrying parents and families. Sometimes we have tears of joy, other times we are realizing perhaps for the first time how much your child may be struggling. The families I work with will do anything to see their child get better and would willingly sacrifice themselves in order to gain a better future for their child. But somewhere, in the process of all this giving, there always is a period of mourning a loss that cannot be named. Sometimes it is as physical as giving up employment to take care of your child’s needs. Other times it may be that along the way, amidst of taking care of others, you lost time in taking care of yourself, your relationship with your significant other. Give yourself the gift of time to make a wishlist of what you would like for yourself for Christmas, for 2020, and make the plan to achieve it. You only have one life to live and yes, you do have responsibilities and the cost on your emotions, time and funding is high, but somewhere, within that maelstrom, is you and your needs. It does not always lie in having a vacation or a new car, sometimes it simply means allowing yourself time to be you!

May you be blessed this Christmas!