I do love the Christmas season.
Everyone, for the most part, is all cheery and happy.
You get smiles on the street from strangers and happy holidays wishes as people shop.
Why can we not be like this all year round?
Ebenezer Scrooge said in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, after he returns from his journey with the three spirits, “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”
There are many ways we can be kinder to the rest of the human race at other times of year besides Christmas.
Even just being nice to people is something I see more of during Christmas.
Why can we not be nice to people all year round, helping out neighbours and saying hi to the person we meet on the street corner?
Working retail in the Christmas season is really a crap shoot. Either people are super nice because it is Christmas or they are super mean because it is Christmas.
One way I try to be nice to retail people is to actually call them by name.
They have a name tag not just for the shear sake of being tattled on. I know a lot of places where staff do not put on name tags if it can be avoided.
Especially when I use their names in a pleasant way, I have always received a happy reaction, or confusion because they think I am calling them by name because I know them.
Christmas is also a time of giving and more charity dollars are coming in during the Christmas season.
There are many reasons people donate to the Humboldt and District Hospital Foundation around Christmas time, says Executive Director, Lorrie Bunko, ranging from donating in the name of a loved one to balancing out their taxes.
November and December are big donation months, says Kevin Reiter with the Humboldt and District Food Bank.
Every year the back of the building is over stuffed with food and they have very few donations coming in from January to April.
People are in that giving spirit, he says, and businesses are attune to that by promoting donations at the tills which increases donations as well.
The one good thing that comes from this is that organizations knows this influx is coming so they work on making Christmas donations last.
Reiter says he focuses on using the food donations until they run out, then he can move on to cash donations that they have received in the Christmas rush.
For Bunko this means budgeting and investing properly during the leaner months to make sure those dollars are available, she says.
I do not begrudge anyone the good they do at Christmas time and both Reiter and Bunko appreciate donations to their organizations at any time of year.
However, can we try to be more like Scrooge and keep Christmas all the year?
