Scorekeeping

One of the major reasons that I'm not a big fan of Christmas is that many people treat others badly because of it. This happens a lot in the days leading up to Christmas (shoppers trampling others over a sale in a retail store, disputes over parking spaces, etc.), as well as on Christmas Day itself. Much of this conflict comes out of differing ideas regarding what others should be doing during the holidays.

Christmas is ideally about giving gifts to people you care about and spending time with them, which is a beautiful concept at the core. The trouble starts when people start keeping score. For example, family members might compare the relative value of gifts exchanged, or the amount of thoughtfulness that goes into the choice of gift. There may be allowances made for relative incomes (a college student isn't expected to spend as much on a gift as his 40 year old uncle in high level corporate management), but it's inevitable that Aunt Jane is going to start getting miffed after receiving monkey-related gifts for the last five years when she doesn't know how Uncle Joe got the idea that she liked monkeys in the first place.

Gift giving is a skill all its own. My wife is very good at it, which is extremely fortunate because I'm very bad at it. Family members often don't allow for that variance in ability, and sometimes get upset with the person who really tried and simply made a bad choice while being very happy with the person who put no thought into it at all and happened to throw a lot of money coincidentally at a lucky choice.

There's also the matter of how you spend your time around the holidays. In the push and pull of conflicting family schedules, things always seem to work out badly for someone, who obviously isn't very happy about it. There are frequent misperceptions (or worse yet, correct perceptions) that one part of the family is being favored over another, and as a result, what should be a happy occasion turns into a source of anger.

People who truly care about each other will generally allow a little slack in these holiday matters (not to mention everything else in life), and yet nearly every family seems to have at least one scorekeeper stirring up so much trouble that the holiday hardly seems worth the effort. As in most things, if someone seems to be slighting you, try to show some forgiveness and understanding, as it's a lot more likely that they've simply made a mistake than that they were trying to intentionally offend you. And if they are intentionally trying to offend you, there's no point in messing up your own karma in retaliation of some kind. There's almost certainly a more skillful way to deal with whatever the underlying problem is.