113. Christmas With Cody

What am I supposed to do? Send a Coffee With Cody email on December 25th and not talk about Christmas? I don’t think so.

As it would happen, I just finished reading a book called “Christmas: A Candid History”, by Bruce David Forbes. If the title spikes your interest, I’ll save you the time and tell you not to read it. It’s not that interesting, not that fascinating, and personally, I found it a bit discouraging.

The more I learned about the history of Christmas and all that seems to come along with it, the less interested I was. The book told of many traditions and how they began, which, if I could use one word to summarize them, it would be “randomly”.

I’ve always loved Christmas, and those close to me know I’m a bit of a Christmas guy. I’m always asked what I like about it so much, and I’ve never had a good answer. Typically I’ll reply and say “all of it”. To say there’s nothing about Christmas I don’t like is truly not much of a stretch, but there’s no one thing I can point to that makes it special.

So why did learning more about the history of Christmas leave me a bit discouraged? Because I felt even less capable of finding a reason to love it.

There’s plenty of music and cinema that exclaims the true meaning of Christmas, and it’s all quite contradictory considering most of them are wrong if there really is one true meaning of Christmas. Then this book comes along and in a nutshell says that Christmas essentially began as a party in the dead of winter to keep people from going crazy with depression and cabin fever.

Yes, there’s more to it than that, and all of your traditions began somewhere, but the meaning you grant to Christmas is simply a result of the right person and the right time with the right amount of influence who started a trend, sold it for the right price and the rest is history.

I thought it would have been nice if the people who invented Christmas gave it an original intended meaning that we could latch on to and feel good about because it had a pure beginning. Turns out that there’s no such thing. And no, there’s no evidence of Jesus being born on December 25th, and it wasn’t Christians who started the tradition.

So what now? I found myself contemplating.

I still love Christmas, and if it means anything to you, I’m glad that it does. Truly I do and I am.

It’s important to me and it’s important that it means something, and it didn’t sit well with me to conclude there is no meaning besides a bunch of random events culminating into what we see today.

So I puzzled and puzzed ‘till my puzzler was sore, and here’s what I’m going with.

Christmas is hope.

Now let me tell you why.

If we have hope, we’ll be okay.

Have you ever had that feeling of not being okay? Have you ever had that feeling at Christmastime? I’d be willing to bet you have. Things seem to be expanded around the holidays. The greatest things in life seem even better, and the tough stuff seems even tougher.

Whatever the case for you, it’s a good time of year to take inventory on what’s going on in your life. Look back and evaluate how things have been going. Look forward and contemplate how things might go.

Each Christmas I like to look back on past Christmas’s and compare. What was December like in 2024, 2023, 2022 and so on. Are things better here in 2025? Why? Why not?

The reason this is habitual for me is because etched in my Christmas memories are thoughts of “I hope things are better next year”.

I hope life is going better next year. I hope family dynamics are better next year. I hope this project is complete next year. I hope we can afford to buy new decorations next year. I hope it snows next year. I hope. I hope. I hope.

It might sound negative. It might seem like looking forward and hoping for a better future takes away from enjoyment of the present, but to me, it’s the exact opposite.

If Cody from past Christmas’s didn’t have hope for a better future, Cody who’s writing to you now would suck.

And the thing is that presently, I sure hope next Christmas will be better than this one. At the same time, I’m very proud of how considerably better this Christmas is compared to last, in many different categories, and I’ll have a holly jolly good time today.

No matter how good things get, if the future looks worse than the present, we’re in for a rough ride. Without hope we have nothing. It’s been proven over and over throughout history that those with hope thrive and those with none perish.

Every holocaust survival story centres around hope. They say as soon as hope was lost, so was life. Hope is what every villain of all time tries to snuff, because they know that with hope, people can do anything.

So you’re telling me there’s a chance!? Always.

Today, I’ll be content because my faith in a better future is steadfast. Sure there’s plenty of nonsense out there to scare us into thinking dark days are coming, but I hope all of that’s wrong.

Hopefully all my efforts this year won’t go to waste. Hopefully nothing terrible happens. I can’t control much anyway, so what use is giving up my hope? What use it is to me to believe things will get worse?

Whatever circumstance you’d like to see improve next year, keep the faith.

Christmas can be your symbol that things will be better.

It can be your reminder of how far you’ve come.

It can be your motivator to continue when all you want to do is give up.

That’s what Christmas means to me, and it’s worth celebrating. It puts a smile on my face to think about it.

You must have been doing pretty good this past year to overcome all you have, but just wait until you see what you’ll do next. To me, Christmas is proof of that.

The best is yet to come, and today, that’s what I’m celebrating.

I hope I’m right.

— Cody

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See you next Thursday.

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