The Sports Informant

There are 20 minutes left on Christmas day, and it’s been quite an eventful one. While I envied my family in Washington for celebrating a Christmas without me in a foot of snow, while we in California hid inside from a torrential downpour of rain and hail, I still enjoyed the little things about the day that I usually take for granted.

For one, I relaxed. As a freshman basketball coach in the area, our season is in full swing, so my spare time after work is now relegated to yelling at 15-year-old boys who might not be hustling. Each day is an adventure, and I enjoy every moment, but to go a whole day without some sort of work for The Sacramento Union or the basketball team was, well, weird. Throughout the day I kept thinking I needed to get ready to go somewhere. I needed to prepare a practice plan or call my writers and see how their articles were coming along.

So when I didn’t, I didn’t know what to do with myself. First, I played “Call of Duty” on Xbox360 for the first time ever, and loved it. It took my wife physically dragging me away from my brother-in-law’s new toy for me to stop. After a more-than-healthy portion of turkey and ham for lunch, I actually took a nap! I’ve taken maybe three naps all year long.

We watched a holiday movie, spent time with family just talking and playing board games, and for a whole day, completely enjoyed being a bum.

There’s a point to all of this. It took the biggest holiday of the year for me to realize that sometimes it’s OK to just relax. Too often we’re all caught in the hustle and bustle of the world’s responsibilities that we don’t take the time to just enjoy… ourselves. It’s a simple thing, really, and we avoid it like the plague because we’re taught all of our lives to keep busy. “Idle hands are the work of the devil,” I was told growing up, although I’ve never figured out if that’s direct quote or paraphrase. Now I realize it takes idle hands to keep us healthy, and a day off from everything is just what I needed to regain my sanity.

So if you’ve got the rest of the weekend off before returning to a hectic schedule on Monday, enjoy it. The opportunity doesn’t knock very often, and if you pass it up, you may miss out on the greatest gift Christmas could bring.