Thirty-Nine Days Until Christmas: Why We Count Down to Everything Except Our Own Healing

Every year around this time, the numbers begin to appear. Thirty-nine days until Christmas. Then thirty-eight. Then thirty-seven. Children start circling toy catalogs. Adults begin listing gifts, travel, gatherings, or, depending on their story, the emotional minefields that lie beneath the surface of the season.

For some, the countdown builds anticipation. For others, it builds dread.

But the question has been sitting with me all day: Why do we count down to a holiday with such precision, yet refuse to count down to our own betterment with the same intention?

We anticipate Christmas with lists, tasks, rituals, and expectations. We orient ourselves to it. We prepare for it. We count on it.

Yet when it comes to our wellness: our anxiety recovery, our trauma work, our emotional clarity, our sense of groundedness, we often wait passively. We hope vaguely. We “try” in scattered ways. We defer commitment until another season. We don’t build a countdown to contentment, even though it is arguably more life-altering than anything wrapped under a tree.

Jordan Peterson once said that hope begins by “setting your sights on something better and moving toward it with honesty.” In other words, the destination matters, but the movement matters more. Healing is not passive. Clarity does not arrive like a holiday delivery dropped on the front porch. It requires the courage to name where you are and the discipline to take the next step.

So why don’t we anticipate our growth the way we anticipate holidays? Why don’t we mark the days leading to a calmer mind, a steadier body, a clearer direction?

Because hope is harder than distraction. Because healing is harder than holiday planning. Because facing ourselves is harder than wrapping gifts.

We aren’t counting down because counting down forces us to face what stands in the way.

Hope requires honesty. And honesty requires clarity about what is barring the path.

Maybe for you, it is unhelpful thinking that has calcified over the years, the kind that tells you nothing can change or that you are too far gone. Maybe it is addiction, subtle or obvious, that has become a behavioral shortcut to numbness. Maybe it is unresolved trauma or pain that still governs your reactions and relationships. Maybe it is anxiety that overrides every attempt to find rest, constantly pushing your nervous system into overdrive.

The writer Annie Dillard once observed, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” If that’s true, then how we count our days matters. Counting down to Christmas without counting down to our own restoration is a strange arrangement: we anticipate the symbolic day while avoiding the actual life we’re living.

There is a way forward, but it begins by naming the barriers with accuracy, without dramatizing them and without minimizing them. Augustine wrote that we must “believe in order to understand,” meaning that sometimes a posture of trust precedes the clarity we want. In therapy, it means we choose to believe that the work we are doing today will matter down the line, even if we cannot yet feel the full effect.

What if this season, instead of merely counting days until December 25, you counted the next 39 days as a deliberate movement toward something better? Not perfection. Not a reinvented identity. Just intentional steps toward stability, regulation, and relief.

Thirty-nine days of clarity over confusion. Thirty-nine days of confronting the patterns that hold you back. Thirty-nine days of discomfort in service of freedom. Thirty-nine days of choosing healing over habit.

There is nothing magical about the holiday countdown itself. The magic comes from expectation, orientation, and preparation, three things that can transform emotional work just as powerfully.

So consider this your invitation to start a different kind of countdown. One marked not by tinsel, but by truth. Not by escape, but by engagement. Not by wishful thinking, but by the steady, disciplined work that shapes a life.

And if you choose to begin, know this: transformation rarely announces itself with fanfare. It happens one intentional day at a time.

Just like any countdown worth taking seriously.

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Listen in to the 39 Shifts to Move You Toward Hope