ABSTRACT
The Howells story is about a little girl who is granted her wish by a fairy with magic power to have Christmas every day for a year. Christmas, a joyous holiday that is meant to celebrate the birth of Christ, is frequently a source of depression and unhappiness. The bad emotional expectations and reactions to Christmas can begin in response to the public decorations, advertisements for sales, and crowds of shoppers that start to burgeon in November, typically in America after Thanksgiving, or sometimes even earlier. A mixture of joy and sadness is present in everyone, but the proportion varies in reaction to each individual’s sense of the passage of time and the possibility of change. This explains why, for some people, making resolutions is essentially a defensive substitution for carrying them out. A habitual pledging instead of following through amounts to denial or non-acceptance of what another part of the mind knows and it implies a psychic split.
