درسنامه اصلی

Christmas – Coaching Lesson

Hi, I’m AJ Hoge. Welcome to this month’s coaching lesson.

I have a lot of good Christmas memories. I can remember my grandmother’s house in Indiana. Indiana is a state kind of in the middle of the United States. And almost every Christmas, my family, my father and mother, my sister and I, and sometimes our pet dog, too, would drive to Indiana to where my grandmother and aunt and uncles, where my extended family lived and actually they still live there.

Extended family is the family beyond your mom, dad, brothers and sisters. It’s your grandparents, your uncles, your aunts, your cousins. So my extended family, most of my extended family, lives in Indiana. So we would drive to Indiana each Christmastime. And there’s so many strong memories I have of those Christmases. The first part that was exciting to me was getting ready for the trip, right?

So we’d have to pack, pack up. Of course, my parents had gifts for us. Sometimes they would mail the gifts to my grandmother’s house and sometimes they would pack them up into the car. And we had a large station wagon.

A station wagon is kind of a long car that has a big area in the back part, kind of a large flat area. But it’s covered, everything’s covered.

So we had a station wagon. And the day we would leave to travel to Indiana, we usually had to drive about eight hours. My dad always liked to get up super early, right? He didn’t want to drive when it was dark and it was wintertime so the days were short. So my dad always wanted to get up early.

And even though he said he didn’t want to drive in the dark, we always left at something like 4:30 in the morning, 5:00 in the morning, and actually it was dark when we left.

But anyway, he didn’t want to drive at night. He didn’t want to arrive late. So we would… they would wake us up. My parents would always wake us up and we’d be so sleepy.

And they would, sometimes they would even just carry us to the station wagon. They would put us in the back. Because, remember the back had this flat part. So my sister and I, we could just continue sleeping in the back. They would put blankets in the back.

So my sister and I, we would lay in the back of the station wagon and we’d sleep for a few hours. My dad and mom, they would get in the front of the car and off we’d go. We’d go drive. And we’d drive and drive and drive.

And, of course, the sun would come up and every few hours we would stop at a rest stop to go to the bathroom. And I always had like a little map, I liked to follow where we were, right?

So I’d say, oh Dad, where are we now? Which state are we in now? Where are we on the map? And we were always asking, “Are we almost there? How much longer?” And we’d look out the windows as we were driving.

Sometimes my sister and I would fight with each other. We’d try to play games to pass the time. And it was all kind of magical actually, I have to say. It was an interesting, magical experience.

So that was the first part, and then finally we would come driving up to my grandmother’s house. Everybody would be super excited. My grandparents would come running out. My aunt and uncles would come running out to meet us at the car and we’d be so excited to see them. We usually only saw them once a year. So it was very exciting and fun to see everybody.

And then, of course, we would go into the house and my grandmother’s Christmas tree would be in the living room. She had a nice green tree and then underneath it would be all of the gifts, right? All these boxes, wrapped up boxes.

And the tree had little colored lights on it. Sometimes it was just white lights, sometimes she had different colored lights. And she had other decorations for Christmas around, y’know? She had like a wreath which is like this, y’know, green leaves in a circle, all the things you see in the movies.

And that, of course, gave a kind of a different special, again, almost magical feeling to the house because it was all decorated. It didn’t just look normal. There were little colored lights everywhere and it was very exciting.

So, of course, we would go in and sometimes my sister and I, we’d go over to the boxes, the gifts under the tree, and we would shake them. We’d pick them up and kind of shake them and feel how heavy they were and try to guess, y’know, what could the gift possibly be?

Of course, we would choose the boxes with our names on it, the gifts that had our names, like “To AJ”. Oh, what is this? Maybe it’s a… maybe it’s a football, maybe it’s a game. And my sister would do the same thing.

We’d usually get there a couple of days or a few days before Christmas. My dad would play golf with my grandfather and my mom would just relax and enjoy with my uncles and aunts. And my sister would play with my aunts and I would play with my uncles. It was a great time.

And then Christmas Eve arrived, the night before Christmas. The night before Christmas, that’s a nice story by the way, the night before Christmas. And as you see in the movies, when we were young, my sister and I, we thought that Santa Claus was real. We thought there really was this guy that flew in the air with the reindeer and he came to your house and he dropped the gifts.

So even though we had some gifts under the tree from our family members, we also believed that there were more gifts coming from Santa Claus.

So every Christmas Eve my sister and I would be sleeping in this room but we couldn’t go to sleep early, right? My parents would make us go into the bed and try to go to sleep and then close the door.

But then my sister and I would sit there talking, “Oh, Santa Claus is coming. Oh do you think… when is he coming?” And we would… sometimes we would look out the window and into the sky to see if we could see the flying reindeer coming to my grandmother’s house. Eventually, of course, we would get sleepy and fall asleep.

Now, of course, as an adult now I know that that’s when my parents would then get some of the extra gifts, Santa’s gifts, the gifts from Santa Claus supposedly, and put those under the tree, kind of the special gifts.

So we’d go to sleep and then Christmas morning we would always wake up early, my sister and I. And, of course, we were super excited. We wanted to open our gifts.

So we would jump out of bed, y’know, maybe at like 6:00 a.m., 7:00 a.m.. Now my poor parents, they had stayed up late putting out the gifts, waiting for us to fall asleep, maybe chatting and talking with the rest of the family.

So they were always sleepy. They wanted to sleep late and my sister and I would run in, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up, time to open the gifts!” So we’d, y’know, kind of shake them and bug them and my parents would be laying in bed, ugh… “In just a minute.”

And then we would run in and see the new gifts around the tree and get excited and then run back and, y’know, shake my parents, “Wake up! Wake up!” Finally, my parents would wake up. But then the whole family had to be there, not just my parents.

And I have this one uncle, whose name is Barry, who… he’s a night owl. A night owl was someone who likes to stay up late. But the problem with night owls is they hate to get up early. They sleep in late, right? They wake up late in the morning.

And so, always, every Christmas, Uncle Barry would be the last person that we were all waiting for. And so we would be knocking on his door, “Uncle Barry, wake up! Uncle Barry, wake up! Time to open the gifts.” And he’d go, “Oh, okay,” and boom, boom, boom.

And this would go on for like an hour, an hour and a half. Us trying to wake him up and him just trying to stay in bed until finally we would drag him out of bed and then we would run to the tree and all the adults would sit around and watch the kids.

And then my sister and I and our cousins would start grabbing gifts and opening them up. Yay! And it would always be some cool new toy that we had wanted because, of course, our parents knew which toys we wanted.

And then after… after finally going through all of them and we would thank, “Oh thank you so much,” thank everybody. And then my parents would gather up all the empty boxes and wrapping paper and throw it all away. Then we would run off to different parts of the house to play with our new toys.

In the afternoon, my grandmother would cook Christmas dinner. It’s, again, that traditional Christmas dinner, always a turkey and there were other ones like candied yams, that’s like a yam or a sweet potato with some sugar on top, she would bake that.

And we had things like corn and green beans and mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes where you have a potato and you smash it so that it’s kind of almost creamy. And these were our, for our family, our traditional Christmas dishes.

So finally, y’know, we’re waiting, waiting, the turkey would always take a long time to make. But finally, maybe around 6:00, 6:30 in the evening, we would all sit together.

They would get this big, long table in the kitchen and adults would sit there and then they would get some other little temporary tables and put those in the living room and that’s where the kids would sit. And we would sit there and we’d all eat together. And the adults would all laugh and joke together.

And that is basically what happened almost every Christmas of my life. The same events repeated every single year. The waking up, the preparing, the driving there, arriving, seeing the family, Christmas Eve, Christmas morning and the dinner. Year after year after year. Very powerful memories for me from my childhood.

Just this year, I visited my extended family again in Indiana with my wife Tomoe. And while we were there, it was summertime, July, my mom had her 70th birthday. Way to go, Mom! And we had a big birthday party. My sister planned a large birthday party at her house.

And the best thing about it was that, all again, all of my extended family came together, all my uncles and aunts, all my cousins, my grandmother, who’s over 90 years old, my sister’s husband, of course, all my sister’s kids, so those are my nephews and nieces.

So, again, we had this huge group and we did the kind of traditional American birthday thing. My sister had a cake and then we sang Happy Birthday and my mom blew out the candles. And we each gave her a small gift.

But the best thing about it was seeing my whole extended family again. Because, of course, it’s a lot of people, the extended family. And because it’s so many people and because in, y’know, modern life people get so busy, we don’t see each other all at once very often.

It was so nice. I appreciated so much to see all of the family together at one time. And it made me remember, I remembered all those Christmases together from my childhood and how much I love that. Really one of my best memories of my life and certainly of my childhood were those Christmases.

So why though? Why? Why was it such a special time for me, that Christmastime? My family wasn’t really religious so it wasn’t really a religious thing. And, of course, as a kid I loved to get gifts. That was fun, getting new toys.

But when I think about it now, I realize, while, yes, I liked getting the toys, really that’s not the thing I loved the most about it. It’s not what made it so special. It wasn’t just the toys.

But it was really the whole ritual. It was a meaningful ritual of connection. A meaningful ritual of connection. And that’s what… indeed, holidays in most countries, right, probably all countries, we have certain traditional, especially traditional family holidays. And those are the times when we all come together.

There’s something though, there are a few different characteristics of these rituals that make them powerful, that make them special. And I’ll talk about why that’s important in a minute. But first, let’s talk about what made Christmas so powerful for me and for my family. And, in general, what makes these holidays or these rituals so powerful.

First of all, a ritual is something that is… it’s repeated, so it’s got a few characteristics. Number one, rituals are scheduled, right? They don’t just happen randomly, right? We didn’t just all get together at just some random time of year.

Oh, sometimes it’s August and sometimes it’s December and sometimes it’s January, sometimes it’s March. No, it was always the exact same time every year. It was scheduled. Christmas is December 25th. Christmas Eve is December 24th. So it was the exact same time every single year. It’s right there on every calendar. So scheduled.

Number two, repeated. So rituals, especially important powerful rituals must be repeated. They’re repetitive. They happen again and again at a regular time period. With Christmas, it’s annually, meaning every year. Every single year at the exact same date we have Christmas, right?

In the United States we also have other holidays, Thanksgiving is another family holiday in the United States and it happens again, every single time in November, year after year after year. It’s repeated, so it’s scheduled, it’s also repeated.

Now it doesn’t have to be annually. Some rituals could possibly happen every single month. Some might happen, y’know, every two years or every three years or every four years.

For example, my wife and I have just started a ritual of doing this special hike, this special pilgrimage hike in Japan, and we’re trying to do it every five years. So, repeated, it has a regular repetition involved.

The next thing that makes a ritual powerful, especially a ritual of connection, which is what Christmas is, it’s a ritual of helping people connect with each other, is that it needs some kind of structure.

Now sometimes we don’t like too much structure. We think, oh, structure, if things are too planned, too structured, sometimes we think, ah, that’s not good, that’s boring.

But the truth is with rituals, with these special times, that having a structure to it so that it’s a bit organized, actually makes it more powerful, not less, right?

That story I told you about Christmas, there’s a structure to it, right? The same things happened each and every year. There was the waking up early, there was the packing, the car, there was the drive to Indiana, there was the family welcoming us, right?

There was shaking the gifts and trying to guess the gifts. Christmas Eve, the night staying up late listening for Santa Claus. The next morning, trying to wake up my family, opening the gifts all together as a family. The Christmas dinner, which always had the same dishes, right?

So a structure, it was kind of an outline and it followed a predictable repeated structure or organization. This is actually very, very important.

And the result of all these characteristics is connection and meaning, a shared connection and a shared meaning. Let’s talk about why this is important.

Most of us in our lives have people, perhaps family members, perhaps good friends, that we wish we connected with more often, and that we wish… we wish we had a deeper connection, a stronger connection, or that we could maintain that more.

Sometimes we struggle with, y’know, how… how do we keep that connection? How do we maintain it? How do we stay close to people we love even if they’re far away or even if we’re super busy? We all get so busy day to day with our jobs, with our kids, with life in general, that it’s easy to lose some of those connections, to lose touch with people.

So yes, you can just pick up the phone and call people and I highly encourage you to do that. But one powerful, powerful way, and this is traditional, it’s ancient, it goes back, y’know, deep and long into the past of human history, are special connection rituals.

Holidays are one kind which most countries have. But it doesn’t have to be a holiday. It can be anything. And you can create your own rituals of connection for your family or for your close friends. Or you can revitalize old ones that maybe have died, right?

So for example, over the last several years my family hasn’t gotten together on Christmas so much. And usually I’m over in Asia, over in Japan at that time of year. And so, I miss that ritual. So I have a few choices.

I could just try to make the effort and fly from Japan back to America for Christmas but it’s a super long flight to go back and forth.

The other choice, which is what I’m doing, is to just create a new ritual which is, y’know, more like a summertime visit and to create, y’know, maybe it’s my mom’s birthday and maybe every year we all come together for my mom’s birthday.

And we can follow those same important things. It can be scheduled. My mom’s birthday is the same time every year. It can be… obviously, it’s repeated, every single year it happens.

And there can be a structure it, again, there’s the whole traveling to Indiana and then there’s, y’know, the birthday party itself, the tradition of the cake, blowing out the candles, giving the gifts. Again, it has that structure. And because of that, it helps to bring my whole family together.

I encourage you this month to think about this with your own life, with your own family. Now it might be your biological family, extended large family, or it could be, y’know, maybe a bunch of your close friends who are all in different places.

And what I want you to do is to create or to revitalize, to revitalize means to make alive again, so create or revitalize a ritual of connection with your family or friends, whatever it is. And then I want you to call them or e-mail them, write to them, whatever, and discuss it.

So, for example, if you celebrate Christmas, maybe your extended family used to get together on Christmas but now everyone’s busy, you could decide, “Y’know, I want to… I want to commit again to making Christmas a special time.”

So call your family members or write them and tell them how you feel about it and encourage everybody to come together this Christmas again. And create some of those special repeated structures, y’know, whatever they are.

Maybe it’s a special meal that you always have or special activities that you always do. Up to you, you decide. Or maybe you don’t want to do a holiday. You could just create a new one.

Y’know, you could also do this with friends, so, for example, for me, I used to have a ritual with a few of my good friends where we played a kind of golf together. It’s called disc golf, you use Frisbees instead of the normal golf.

But what we used to do is we used to play every week. So we had one day of the week and we always knew that, okay, on Sundays, I can’t remember which day it was, but let’s say Sundays, that every Sunday we are going to get together in the afternoon and play disc golf together.

So it was scheduled so we always made sure that that time was free. It was repeated every single week, every single Sunday. And there was a structure to it, right? We would drive there. We would do the same thing. We would play the golf course. And just that little tiny ritual of connection made us better friends, brought us together, right?

If we hadn’t done that, if we didn’t have that ritual, all of us could easily have gotten too busy and oh, then we don’t see each other every week. Oh, maybe then two weeks, maybe three weeks… oh, I’m so busy… could go and we’d never see each other for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, or something like that.

But because we had that ritual, that weekly, scheduled, repeated, structured ritual, we always saw each other week after week after week. It made us closer friends. It made us better friends and I’m still good friends with those guys.

So we have to make the effort in this modern world. We have to create these rituals of connections and we have to protect them. Because the world is full of distractions now, so many distractions. Y’know, from the media, from work, the economy, etc., etc., so many distractions.

It’s so easy to let these rituals of connection die. It’s easy not to make the effort to create new ones. But it’s a tragedy to do so because our relationships, our family and our friends, are the most precious thing in our life. And so they are worth protecting and it’s worth it to create a few special rituals of connection with your family and your friends.

And indeed, this month that’s your homework, that’s your assignment. Choose one for your family and choose one for your best friends.

And choose an event, make it a scheduled, something that happens at a specific time on a specific date. Make sure it’s repeated, maybe it repeats, maybe it’s once a year you do it, maybe it’s once a month, maybe it’s once a week, whatever, you decide. And then make it structured so you do some of the same activities every single time.

It might be simple. It might be lots of different things. Again, you decide. But do this and then talk to your family and talk to your friends and tell them why it’s important to you and get them to do it. Get them to join and commit to doing it with you. I promise you, you will be so happy that you did.

Tell us your results on our social site. I look forward to hearing about the success and about the deeper connections you form by creating these rituals of connection in your life.

See you next time. Bye for now.