Welcome to It's a Good Life podcast, where it's all about helping entrepreneurs think, feel, and do better.

Today, we wanted to bring you a special episode from the archives.

One of our most downloaded episodes, we hope you enjoy.

Well, top of the morning, Tia, and welcome to the Christmas edition of It's a Good Life. I want to be the first to wish you a happy Christmas, which is what we say at home. Merry

Christmas. I'm a yank, obviously. I've been in the States now over 38 years, God bless us.

But happy Christmas is the words I always associate

with it. It's one of my favorite times a year, especially as part of my fate tradition, but also

is wrapped up with Christmas for me as the nostalgia of growing up in Ireland and the memories

of that as a kid. Christmas was a very, very special time. You know, one of the beauties of being raised in an environment where you don't have a lot of resources is that things were special. You know, if you eat out all the time, and it's funny, like this time of year, I've had so many business dinners and so on so forth, trying to eat good and whatever else. But now, oh, we're at the restaurant this night.

We're at the restaurant that night. And after a while, it starts to lose a little bit of its specialness. When you eat rich foods, you know, then they stop being rich, you know. And when you can get whatever you want, whenever you want, it stops being special. And we, we didn't have very much and you got a few things every year as a kid.

And I always remember, you know, in Ireland it was always dark early in the mornings and then dark early in the evening.

So we have very little sunlight.

We're up much more northerly in the hemisphere than most people realize.

And we always remember in school, you'd go to school in the dark and you'd come home in the dark.

And Christmas was like that. But there was one light and that light was on the Christmas tree. And we used to wake up, first thing in the morning, we had what we called the front room. And the front room was where the Christmas tree was. And I always remember, you'd look under the door to see if you could get a glimpse or whatever was inside. And the breeze would come underneath the door and blind you. You know, just your eyes were hurting. And you'd feel that cold wind.

But it was that sense of expectation. It was the promise of something new. And the expectation, as it

turned out, was always better than the real thing. I mean, there were certain things you got every year. We got socks every year. We got underwear every year. And then you'd get one thing that was yours. You might get a ball or maybe there was a bike one year. I think somebody got a bike. It wasn't me. Maybe we were doing better when the old man got older. But you got one like special gift. But it was just the anticipation of that.

They always kept it a secret. Such a great thing. So I'm going to talk about the ghosts of Christmas

past, the lessons of Christmas presents and the blessings of Christmas future. Doesn't that sound nice?

So the ghost of Christmas past. Why does it go wrong for people? Well, the first one like we talk about

is debt, okay?

And so 34% of Americans go into more debt around the holidays.

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