Plenty of scrooges live on campus here.

You know who you are. To you I say, “bah-humbug.”

It doesn’t matter if you’re atheist, Christian, Catholic, Baptist, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim or none of the above — you have no excuse — smile. Just because it’s cold doesn’t mean you have to brandish a completely frigid exterior. Be kind to others, give gifts and be a little more forgiving this month. Take it easy on your siblings and do all that other hearty good stuff that should happen this time of year.

The shameful truth of it all is, none of this happens. We’re too busy celebrating or getting ready to celebrate Chanukah, Christmas, Ramadan, Kwanzaa or whatever else we feel the need to be festive and feast-tive about this time of year.

We’re in such a hurry to get through finals, get all those gifts, get ready for the trip to get home that we all forget what this month is supposed to be about. Holiday stress should not exist. Suicides shouldn’t be common this time of year.

But all of this happens, and it’s all because we forget to breathe.

Take the time to admire the snow. Take a pause every now and then to get a context of it all. If you’re celebrating or preparing to celebrate all of these things and work yourself into a tizzy about it all, you’ll forget why exactly it is you’re celebrating these things.

Christmas and all the other holidays are small potatoes anyway.

It’s important to celebrate the true meaning of what all of those holidays are about, but the reality of it is, most of us probably don’t do that too much, beyond reading a story in the Bible or Koran. We need to do more — year round.

The cruelness of December and the Holiday Season is that it comes only once a year. Those who do chose to do all the hearty good stuff forget about the other 11 months and go back to being their normal self-centered selves.

When the holiday season resembles more of a reality television show than a celebration, it’s gone too far. When you have to out-wrap, out-shop and outlast your other relatives and loved ones, something has to give. Someone will get voted off and others will simply flip out and go mad as if they were stranded on an island of Holiday Misgiving.

The holidays aren’t a competition. Don’t celebrate them as if they were.

The holidays are about showing love to those close to you and maybe even some who aren’t so close.

Think about taking it all one step further. Think about giving gifts or donating to charity on Jan. 12 for no other reason than you have the means to be able to do so. Give a little something every day, and smile every day because you can, not because it’ll help the economy or it’s what you’re supposed to do this time of year.

That sort of stuff will scare the scrooge out of anyone.