This might surprise some of you but I’m not a big holiday person. Over most of my years the only holiday I ever really cared about was Thanksgiving, and that was because the family was together for a very nice meal that I knew I was only getting once a year.

Glen Scott via Compfight

My dad’s favorite holiday was Christmas, but since Dad’s not physically with us any longer the spirit is gone for me. Mom has never liked holidays. As a child, Mom got really sick at every single major holiday for some reason which, as I think about it, I believe was stress related since she did all the cooking and wanted it to be special. My wife has never believed in holidays to begin with, and my grandmother, who also is no longer with us, was pretty even keeled no matter what the season or day was.

Over the last few days in the office where I’m working, one lady in particular has been pushing out the Christmas spirit on everyone else. I want to blame it on her being a minister’s wife, but truth be told her cellphone’s ringtone is Let It Snow, and it was that when she first came to work in the office back in July. Truthfully I think she’s a little addled, but she’s someone who seems to have this spirit around her that, while not necessarily happy, has a touch of innocence that’s touching in one way, irritating in another, and makes me laugh all day because she’s unintentionally funny. 🙂

I guess it’s this last one that I really want to address more than anything else. On my long post about how to write a guest post, I highlighted an article I wrote on Adrienne Smith’s blog about social networking that ended up getting a lot of responses. However, as I looked at many of those responses again, I realize that most people saw what I wrote in the context of marketing and making money online rather than building up relationships with other people, building trust that might lead someone to ask you what you do and think about buying from you. In my eyes the two things are exclusive from each other, but in the minds of so many the only real reason to be online is to try to make money.

I see that a lot on Google Plus. Most of the sharing is how people can market themselves there and almost everywhere else (Facebook excluded most of the time), how to build up the numbers, how to get more people to sign up for newsletters or voluntarily put their name on email lists, etc. It’s an interesting culture because so many of them use that as an excuse as to why they no longer like Facebook, although it seems the majority of people who officially leave Facebook do so because of worries about privacy, which I can fully understand while also saying that more of them needed to be a bit more perspicacious in their actions up front so that it wasn’t as big a worry as it turned out to be.

With that said I want to get back to my original question because I think it’s of utmost importance, especially since we’re in another holiday season, the biggest monetary holiday of the year. How do you view the concept of holiday spirit? Are your particular beliefs religious, economic, commercial, spiritual, or something else?

To me it’s a bigger question than you might think because I’m of the opinion that holiday spirit means nothing if you can’t find a way to capture that feeling year round, or at least often during the year without the need for a holiday. I believe that too many people miss the opportunities that are abundant for happiness, jocularity, contentment, peacefulness and calm feelings.

You want to know something? If I wanted to look at the week I’ve had to this point I could say that there are a few things that really could have made this one of the worst weeks I could think of. Instead, I rolled with the punches, found some humor in bad situations, and am still feeling pretty good tonight, even though I passed up the opportunity to buy both the glazed cake-icing filled donuts and the mint Oreos, which would have made me temporarily happy but would have probably hurt me on the back end; heck! lol

Is that a pretty good teaser for you to check out the video below? Maybe, maybe not, but I’ll ask this question of you instead, and it’s the question above with a second part to it. What do you believe the holiday spirit is, and how do you find ways to capture it during the year, if you do? Maybe the video below will help you formulate a response; let’s find out: