Christmas

Christmas is the chosen deadline that gives Morris Goodman’s recovery story its dramatic shape. After an airplane crash left him completely paralyzed, unable to breathe independently, and expected by doctors to remain a vegetable, he imagined himself walking out of the hospital and fixed Christmas as the day on which that vision would become physically demonstrable.

A Deadline Set Against Medical Prognosis

Christmas enters the narrative after Goodman’s March 10, 1981 airplane crash. His spinal cord was crushed, his first and second cervical vertebrae were broken, his swallowing reflex was destroyed, and his diaphragm could no longer sustain breathing. He could eat or drink nothing and could communicate only by blinking. The doctors concluded that he would never recover ordinary bodily function and would remain a vegetable for the rest of his life.

Against that prognosis, Goodman concentrated on the one resource he believed remained available: his mind. He pictured himself as a normal person again and specifically imagined walking out of the hospital. Christmas therefore becomes the temporal boundary of a conflict between the doctors’ forecast and the future he repeatedly represented to himself.

The Goal and Its Reversal

Goodman’s recovery is narrated through a sequence of bodily reversals. While attached to a respirator, he was told that the destruction of his diaphragm meant he would never breathe on his own again. He nevertheless held to the repeated inner command, “Breathe deeply, breathe deeply.” Eventually he was weaned from the respirator, leaving the medical staff without an explanation for the change described in the account.

The Christmas goal then supplies the story’s clearest test. Goodman had set himself the objective of walking out of the hospital on Christmas, despite being unable even to breathe independently at the outset. He did walk out on his own two feet. The date marks the point at which his imagined future overtakes the condition that had seemed to define him, and the narrative presents the result as a direct challenge to the assertion that recovery was impossible.

Symbolic and Narrative Function

The date gives an otherwise extended healing account a concrete culmination. Rather than leaving recovery as an indefinite promise, Christmas converts Goodman’s vision into a deadline, a visible outcome, and a remembered day. The narrative emphasizes that it was a day he would never forget, making the holiday both the climax of the hospital ordeal and the permanent marker of his reversal from paralysis to independent movement.

Goodman is presented as “The Miracle Man,” and his Christmas departure is treated as the central evidence for the book’s claim that the human mind possesses immense and seemingly unlimited potential. The account does not describe Christmas as the cause of the recovery; it describes the date as the goal Goodman chose while sustaining a mental image of walking again. Its force comes from the contrast between the calendar deadline and the severity of the initial injuries.

Meaning Within the Healing Argument

Within the book’s broader discussion of health, Goodman’s story is used to connect thought, imagination, feeling, and physical change. The narrative states that he could not permit distracting thoughts to interfere with his goal or vision, and it interprets his recovery as proof that what he deliberately brought into being through thought could be changed through thought as well.

His Christmas achievement is consequently generalized beyond the individual case. The book says that the story has inspired thousands of people to imagine and feel their way back to health, and it presents the greatest challenge of Goodman’s life as becoming his greatest gift. His concluding maxim, “Man becomes what he thinks about,” turns the date into more than a biographical detail: Christmas is the point at which the book’s doctrine receives its most memorable personal demonstration.

Contrast With Other Healing Stories

Christmas also contrasts with the healing stories surrounding Goodman’s. Cathy Goodman’s account of breast cancer centers on daily gratitude, the belief that she was already healed, and the deliberate use of funny movies to create laughter while avoiding stress. Her inspiration came partly from Norman Cousins, whom doctors had told he had only a few months to live and whose account says that three months of watching funny movies and laughing preceded the disappearance of his disease.

Those stories emphasize repeated emotional and imaginative practices, whereas Morris Goodman’s story is organized around one sharply defined date. The contrast strengthens the book’s recurring pattern: a diagnosis or prognosis establishes apparent impossibility, a change in belief supplies the turning point, and a claimed recovery provides the triumphant ending. Christmas is the exact temporal hinge of Goodman’s version of that pattern.