Un-Scrooge Yourself This Holiday Season With A Shift In Perspective

For some, the Holiday Season is a fun and festive time of year, filled with joy and laughter, and happiness.

For others...well, it's a little trickier for them to embrace all that sugar and spice. Instead, they feel a sense of dread, or disgust or just find the Holiday Season depressing.

When the two personality types live under one roof, it can be difficult to navigate the Christmas Season.

I know this firsthand because while I grew up loving everything about the entire month of December, my younger brother Pat was the complete opposite.

I love gift-giving. He hates it. I love Christmas carols. He hates them. I love decorations. He could care less about them.

I wondered if and how this would change when he grew up and had a family of his own.

This year, he shared something interesting with me, and I thought (with his permission) I'd pass it along.

This is Pat's advice for Un-Scrooging your holiday season. A bit of holiday wisdom from my little (he will always be little to me, even if he is an actual grown-up now) brother:

"The holidays have always been a mix of emotions for me and until I had kids, never really get overly enthusiastic about it. I was particularly unenthusiastic about setting up decorations that I would just have to take down in a few weeks. My wife is the complete opposite, there are never enough Christmas decorations. After being a crusty old scrooge for the second year in a row around setting up the lights and decorations, my wife, who happens to be a therapist said the following thing to me:

'Christmas is a time for doing things that you might not like because it’s important to someone else. So shut up and do it, you Scrooge!'

I thought it was enlightening so I wrote it on the Christmas bin as a reminder."

"Every year when I go down to the basement to retrieve the bin of Christmas decorations, I come up and sarcastically announce it to my family with a better perspective on the activity of decorating for the holidays."

And if you needed some proof that this actually worked for him, well...

I'd say he mustered a bit of Holiday Spirit, if for no other reason than because he knew it would make my sister-in-law and my nephews smile.

Giving of yourself for the sake of bringing joy to the ones you love. I think you nailed it, Pat.

Well done.