As the season to be jolly and give fades from view day by day, the warm feelings of the winter holidays dwindle and leave us all with an attitude that good will is as good as gone. But why does the end of the winter season have to mean the end of good will?

By now families have taken down their winter décor and cleaned the house of their delicious, festive, traditional foods, and are left with gifts and memories of good times with family and friends, donating to charity, showing love and being generally in the holiday spirit until this time next year.

It’s just normal for people to constantly become more welcoming, loving, and caring during the winter season of holidays that begin with Thanksgiving and end on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday- a four month span. With a plethora of holidays, it is difficult for anyone to turn a blind eye to the less fortunate. We give our old clothes to the Salvation Army, we cook at homeless shelters, and we even give money to men and women walking highway medians looking for a hot meal and a dollar.

It seems as if this all ends when snow is no longer mentioned in the weather reports, birds start to sing, and winter shopping sales no longer exist. Is it because we no longer have to be good for Ole Saint Nick or show our counterparts that we have a heart and believe in helping others?

There are those that say our society is growing callous. Others say there is no longer that special feeling that compels us to help others. The sad truth is that we don’t like helping people as much as we’d like to take credit for. Don’t get me wrong; we all want to do our share, but, when it comes to the end of the season, we so easily move to new self-interest and put all our benevolence on the shelf until the commencement of the next holiday season. It’s the natural thing to do!

We should however, forget those habits of the mind that make us charitable one season and hardened the next. We should relinquish our need to be "nice" only for a couple months and become creatures of habit when it comes to charity and spreading good will spirit. Do your part as a human being and show some compassion whether it be Christmas or Independence Day; the second day of Hanukkah or June 7th ; Kwanza or Labor Day. Make every day a day of good will.