By GAIL LOWE
It was Norman Vincent Peale who gave the world 10 simple words about how to have a happy life:
• Expect little
• Give much
• Live simply
• Love much
• Forget self
Like many other people in my generation, my parents struggled to survive the Great Depression, took calculated risks to improve their lot, made saving money a priority and probably made a boatload of mistakes along the way.
My father was one of six kids. Born in a rural area of Nova Scotia, he and his brothers and sisters were all happy with little. On Christmas morning, they looked forward to seeing what Saint Nicholas left in each of their stockings. One year, they all got an orange, a fruit that had to be shipped in from Florida or California, places that seemed as far away as Timbuktu. Oranges in those days were probably equivalent to a dinner at the Capital Grille today.
Family legend has it that my father hid his orange in a secret place so his brothers and sisters wouldn’t help themselves to it and every day when no one was looking he’d take that orange out of its hiding place and have a sniff. Today, psychologists would say that he was showing his emotional maturity by delaying gratification. Rather than gobble it down in one gulp, he was content to have a daily sniff of that fruity citrus.
He told my sister and me that he loved to rub his fingers over the orange’s nubbly skin and looked forward to his first bite. He even measured the orange and figured it was more than six inches in circumference, the biggest one he had ever seen. How he loved that orange and how he looked forward to the day he would finally peel away its skin and take extreme pleasure in savoring every drop of juice, every bit of pulp.
But then came the day when he went to sniff his orange, only to find that it had shriveled to about four inches.
There had been a severe cold snap that week and the orange suffered the consequences.
When he sliced open his treasured orange, he found it all dried up and shriveled. Not one drop of juice and the pulp was no more edible than wood shavings. A valuable lesson my father learned that day and he reminded us often: Don’t put off your enjoyments today because they may evaporate tomorrow. To balance his lesson, he also instructed that a greedy, “must have right now” attitude was not the way to go, either.
“Grab something too greedily and it will slip right through your fingers,” he warned.
Greed, or avarice, and its cousin envy, has been with us since the beginning of human history. But in the past decade, greed has taken over headlines, beginning with Bernie Madoff and ending with the Koch brothers. There’s even a TV show called American Greed.
I found an online essay on greed recently and the crux of the piece was that possessions — from McMansions to BMWs and everything in between — will never bring happiness. And the more people clamor for things and the more they have, the less happy they’ll be in the long run.
How many of us have given our children the toys of their dreams, only to discover them a few months later, forgotten at the back of their closet. How many women have bought an expensive designer pocketbook or other item, only to tire of it later on.
Possessions do not bring lasting happiness and they do nothing to fill the void in us all. It’s as simple as that.
The love of money and what it can buy is a dangerous trap that has ruined family relations. It has forced couples into separation and divorce. It has brought down corporations and even Wall Street.
When my daughter was about 12, she tried her hand at running her own business. One day we sat at the kitchen table and brainstormed about what she could offer as a babysitter that other kids her age might not think of. She then used crayons and Magic Markers to design a grocery store bag with colorful letters that said “Beth-Ann’s Babysitting Bag.” She filled the bag with coloring books and crayons, Play-Doh and finger paints and construction paper and went door to door in our neighborhood offering her “specialized” babysitting services to mothers of young children.
“Your children will never be bored while I’m watching them” was Beth-Ann’s mission statement. She got quite a few jobs and gained some experience about what it takes to promote a business. I insisted that the money she earned was not to be spent only on her own desires but split three ways: Charity first, savings second and then herself.
I also taught her to never trust money because it can be gone in a flash.
“As much as you might grow to love money, remember this: It will never make you happy and it will never love you back,” I said.
While raising her, I tried to instill in her other values like helping the lonely and needy and giving beyond what was expected.
It’s what my own father taught us, so it seemed natural to pass down his teaching to the next generation.
The spirit of the Christmas season is everywhere — in stores, on corners where Salvation Army bell ringers are hoping for donations, in churches and in private homes where Christmas cards are being written and the Elf on the Shelf is showing up in strange and amusing places.
But the spirit of Christmas is sorely needed in other areas — homeless shelters, soup kitchens and halfway houses. When you review your shopping list, remember what Norman Vincent Peale taught and “give much.”
Enjoy the season — it only comes once a year, after all. But avoid letting the worldly attitude of greed enter in. It will only spoil things for you and your family and diminish the importance of what Christmas is all about: The world’s most wonderful gift of hope.
