There are habits we repeat because we repeated them last year, and the year before that, and somewhere along the way, repetition began to masquerade as meaning.
At the end of A Christmas Carol, after Scrooge has seen what his life becomes if he keeps going the way he’s been going, he makes a vow.
“I will honor Christmas in my heart all year long.”
It’s a line that lands cleanly in the script. It always has. The language is simple. Declarative. Almost modest, considering what’s come before it. After ghosts and visions and reckonings, the ending resolves itself into a sentence that sounds calm, even reasonable.
As I head into the final week of A Christmas Carol, in which I play Scrooge, I say those words every night. The repetition changes them. Not because they lose meaning, but because they refuse to settle into one meaning. They don’t stay put. They keep shifting, depending on the night, the room, the audience, the particular weight of the day I’ve just come through.
When I’m on stage, I’m present. Fully. Acting demands that. There’s no wandering. No mental drift. The moment is the moment, and the words are the words. But once the curtain comes down, the vow doesn’t leave with the costume. It follows me out of the theater. It shows up again later, quietly, when there’s no applause to hold it in place.
What does it actually mean to honor Christmas?
Not the idea of it. Not the version that lives in lights and music and inherited ritual. But the thing itself, whatever that is underneath the decorations and expectations and memory. The thing the vow gestures toward without spelling out.
Christmas, as it exists offstage, is not quiet. It’s dense. It’s busy. It’s full of errands, logistics, and timing. Meals to plan. Gifts to choose and second-guess. Conversations you know are coming because they come every year, sometimes warm, sometimes strained, sometimes both at once.
There are habits we repeat because we repeated them last year, and the year before that, and somewhere along the way, repetition began to masquerade as meaning. It’s not that the habits are empty. It’s that they carry more weight than they can reasonably hold.
There’s a lot of pressure packed into a short window of time. Pressure to feel something. Pressure to make it count. Pressure not to miss the moment, or mishandle it, or fail to rise to whatever unspoken standard is hovering in the background.
And none of that exists in isolation.
The world doesn’t pause for Christmas. It keeps doing what it’s been doing. Dividing. Accelerating. Wearing people down. Wealth and poverty sit side by side without really touching. Politics that feel less like disagreement and more like a constant state of agitation. A sense that everything is urgent, and nothing ever quite resolves.
It’s hard to know where Christmas fits inside all of that now. Or what it’s asking of us. Or whether the old answers still apply.
When Scrooge makes his vow, it sounds clean. Clear. Almost simple. But standing inside those words night after night, I don’t experience them as simple at all. I experience them as unsettled. As something that refuses to become an instruction.
Because honoring Christmas can’t live in abstraction, it has to live somewhere specific. In actual days. In ordinary moments. In relationships that are imperfect and ongoing. In the way we move through the world, when things are inconvenient, uncomfortable, or heavy.
That’s where the question keeps returning.
What does it mean to honor Christmas now?
The world the vow has to live in
The vow doesn’t float above reality. It collides with it.
Christmas arrives layered on top of everything else that’s already happening. News alerts. Opinions. Economic anxiety. A low, persistent hum of tension that never fully shuts off, even when the decorations go up and the music starts playing again.
The season doesn’t replace that noise. It competes with it. Sometimes it amplifies it.
There’s an insistence to December that can feel almost aggressive. Everything matters at once. Everything needs attention now. Even the holiday itself gets pulled into the machinery. Buy this now. Decide this now. Feel this way now. Make this moment meaningful before it disappears.
The speed alone makes it difficult to tell what’s real and what’s just loud.
Dickens gives Scrooge ghosts. We give ourselves feeds. Headlines. Commentary. A constant stream of partial information and competing urgencies. There’s no single figure pointing clearly at consequences, just an accumulation of signals that never quite add up to clarity.
Caring becomes fragmented. Not because we don’t care, but because attention doesn’t have a place to settle. Everything asks for a response, and very little invites reflection.
Nostalgia hovers nearby, offering itself as a solution. Christmas used to be simpler. Kinder. More innocent. That story is comforting, and it’s repeated often enough that it starts to sound like truth. But it’s selective. It remembers warmth and forgets tension. It highlights belonging and forgets exclusion. It smooths the past until it fits neatly inside the present.
Standing inside this season now, the past doesn’t feel like an answer so much as a reference point that no longer applies cleanly. It doesn’t tell me how to live with the contradictions that are right here. It doesn’t tell me how to honor anything in a world that feels this complicated.
Which leaves the vow suspended. Not broken. Just without a clear place to land.
Attention, in December
December does strange things to attention. The days don’t slow down the way the season suggests they should. They compress. Decisions stack on top of one another. Calendars fill. Even quiet moments start to feel scheduled, as if stillness itself needs to justify its existence.
There’s a sense that time is running out, not just practically, but emotionally. If something meaningful is going to happen, it needs to happen now. If connection is going to be felt, it needs to register immediately, before the moment passes and the calendar turns.
Attention gets pulled in every direction at once. Practical concerns. Emotional undercurrents. Small, nagging questions that refuse to stay small. Did I forget something? Did I do enough? Did I miss the moment when this was supposed to feel different?
There’s also a particular kind of self-monitoring that happens this time of year. Watching ourselves feel. Checking in to see if our reactions line up with what we think they should be. Measuring experience against some invisible standard of joy or gratitude or connection.
It’s tiring, this constant watching.
The irony is that Christmas is supposed to be about attention. About noticing. About seeing people who might otherwise be overlooked. But the season that asks for presence is also the one most likely to scatter it.
So much of December is built around performance. Not acting in the theatrical sense, but presenting. Hosting. Showing up correctly. Moving through rituals that once carried meaning and now carry expectation. None of that is inherently hollow, but it leaves very little room to simply notice what’s actually happening.
Attention slides toward urgency. Toward logistics. Toward managing impressions. Toward making sure nothing goes wrong. And somewhere in that shift, the vow starts to feel distant, even when the words are familiar.
Honoring anything under those conditions feels less like a single decision and more like a continual return. Noticing you’ve wandered. Redirecting, briefly. Then wandering again.
Brands and the noise
Brands are not outside this environment. They’re woven into it.
They live where attention lives. They help shape the rhythm of days in ways that are often invisible but deeply felt. What gets repeated. What feels urgent. What’s framed as necessary, overdue, or desirable.
December compresses that influence until it’s impossible not to notice.
Messages pile up. Language gets louder. Emotional cues are simplified to travel faster. Care. Joy. Generosity. Urgency. All reduced to signals meant to land instantly. Some of that comes from sincere intention. Some from habit. Some from fear of being ignored. By the time it reaches us, it all carries the same pressure.
In an environment like that, attention doesn’t deepen. It skims. It scans. It moves on. Even things that matter begin to feel interchangeable, another appeal in a season already crowded with them.
Brands don’t create this condition on their own, but they reinforce it every time speed is chosen over clarity, volume over specificity, urgency over orientation. Not because they’re careless, but because the system rewards movement more than reflection.
And yet, occasionally, something feels different. Not louder. Not more emotional. Just steadier. Oriented. As if it knows what it’s there to do and who it’s there for, even in the middle of all this noise.
Those moments are noticeable because they don’t demand immediate response. They don’t hurry you toward a feeling. They allow attention to rest, if only briefly.
That presence doesn’t come from seasonal messaging. It comes from decisions made elsewhere. From how a brand behaves when there isn’t a campaign attached. Whether clarity is valued enough to slow down, even as everything around it speeds up.
In a season already full of pressure, brands still make choices, whether they frame them that way or not. They add to the noise, or they create a pocket of orientation inside it. What they reinforce becomes part of the atmosphere people move through.
Unease and meaning
When I sit with the vow, what I feel most often isn’t clarity. It’s unease.
Not panic. Not despair. Just a persistent sense that meaning is harder to locate than it used to be, and that reaching for it too quickly risks grabbing something hollow.
Nostalgia makes that temptation stronger. It offers meaning without friction. It asks us to look backward instead of around. But nostalgia only works when the past still fits the present, and for many of us, it doesn’t.
Loss sharpens that realization. When the people who anchored the season are gone, the rituals remain, but their center of gravity shifts. You go through the motions and feel the absence underneath them. You’re not mourning Christmas itself so much as the way meaning once arrived without effort, carried by other people’s presence.
What replaces that isn’t despair. It’s responsibility.
Meaning doesn’t arrive automatically anymore. It has to be noticed. It appears briefly, in small moments of recognition or connection, and disappears again if you’re not paying attention.
That’s where the unease lives, not in emptiness, but in the demand to stay awake inside complexity. To let grief and gratitude coexist. To let joy happen without insisting on it. To allow the season to be incomplete and still worth entering.
Honoring Christmas, seen this way, isn’t about preserving a mood or recreating a past. It’s about remaining present to what’s human, even when it’s unresolved.
The return
I keep coming back to the moment itself. The vow spoken out loud. The room quiet. The words hanging there longer than they should.
“I will honor Christmas in my heart all year long.”
I don’t hear it as a promise of consistency anymore. I hear it as a willingness to return. To notice where attention has gone and decide, quietly, whether to follow it or not. To reenter the world rather than stay insulated from it.
The world doesn’t reward that kind of attention. It rewards speed, certainty, and confidence. Which may be why presence feels fragile now, and why it matters.
This is where the work at ThoughtLab keeps intersecting with this question for me. Not as an answer, but as a practice. Paying attention to what gets reinforced. Watching language either clarify or obscure. Resisting the urge to declare meaning before it’s earned.
It’s slow work. Often uncomfortable. It refuses tidy conclusions.
Which brings me back to Christmas again. To the sense that honoring it isn’t about feeling the right thing, but about staying with the question when it would be easier to move on.
So I keep saying the words. I keep letting them unsettle me. Not because I expect resolution, but because the question itself feels worth carrying.
Honoring what we say matters, doesn’t happen in declarations. It happens in attention. In where we return when the noise pulls us away. That practice isn’t seasonal, and it doesn’t resolve neatly, but it may be the most honest way we have of living the vow at all.
