Reclaim the Season

The season of generosity is upon us.  Packages, cards, and shopping, shopping, shopping!  I find myself missing the times when the holidays weren’t all about shopping and finding the perfect gift.  I long for the time when this season was about wonder, miracles and love.  Am I the only one?  If not, how do we get back there?


I decided to begin my own personal crusade to reclaim the holiday season this year with practicing a different kind of generosity.  That’s not to say that I’ve not done my patriotic duty and shopped my little brains out as I lightened the load of my checking account.  Nope, I have.  Only this year, I decided to add a generous dose of virtues to my gift giving.  You know, those innate qualities that we all have that sometimes lay dormant for months or years; compassion, kindness, lightheartedness, fearlessness, faith.  The list is quite long.


This is how my attempt to reclaim the holiday season is working for me.  I have a little box of cards that were a gift from a friend.  Each card has a single virtue on it, like the ones I listed above and more, such as devotion, serenity, forgiveness, joyfulness and respect.  For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been blindly picking a card every other day or so.  I use the chosen virtue on the card to inform my interactions with everyone I meet.  It feels like going on a treasure hunt as I seek out a particular virtuous quality hidden in myself and others.  Each day, a new miraculous expression of Love is revealed.  What’s been amazing to me is how much a single word brought into our conscious awareness can reveal wonder to us


Recently, one of my “virtues for the day” was “kindness.”  I discovered a well of kindness inside that found myriad means of expression.  More interesting to me was the kindnesses that I recognized in others.  All day long, I found myself the beneficiary of others’ kindness.  From kind drivers, to kind clerks and kind clients, I was awash in kindness with a childlike eagerness to share the treasure with others.  I never knew that virtues put into actions become like dominoes of the heart.  What a great game I’ve discovered!


The writings of Brother Lawrence, a humble and quiet monk of the 17th Century, were compiled in a tiny little book entitled “The Practice of the Presence of God.”  His message was a simple one; he practiced behaving in each moment “as if there were no one but Thee and Me.”  This season, the virtues of the heart, the virtues that make up the best of humanity, have become a means of reclaiming the wonder of the season of re-discovering the truth of which Brother Lawrence wrote.  There is no one but Thee and me.  May your Holidays be resplendent with the shimmering jewels of the heart!


  1. (c)2001 Melanie McGhee                                                                                                              Originally published in THE DAILY TIMES, Maryville, TN