'Tis The Season...

I feel guilty on Christmas...not for what I have, or for what I'll get, but because of just what I take for granted...and I always do.  Somehow I always manage to forget my privileges in great big heaping piles.  I have a wonderful family. I have a job I love, that gives meaning to my days without compromise.  I am not poor or of poor health.  I have friends.  I have freedom and often too many choices.  I don't often have to just accept that things are the way they are, no, more often than not I am able to dictate just how I want them to be.  All of my life I have avoided tragedy and hardship, or at least what I perceive to be tragedy and hardship.  I am happy.

There are a lot of people who have less...some of them are people who earn more, or were raised with more, or who will always have much, much more than I will.  Bigger, newer houses...better cars...more money...more opportunity...better back up plans...more support...ways and means and an absolute abundance of many of the things that we all chase...but they don't have the pride that I have...and they don't have the grace and thankfulness...they certainly don't have the good fortune of living without obligation, debt, or unchosen responsibility.

Some of them don't simply have choice...a child whose diagnosis changes everyone's lives...a natural phenomenon that forces ruin and change...setbacks and mountains that must be climbed...loss...trauma... I have nothing to fear, worry about, or manage...just the things that I've chosen.

I feel guilty at Christmas but not for reasons that you might guess.  I don't have as much as some people, but I have everything I've ever asked for, and hardly anything that I haven't.  'Tis the season to remember that and so I try.