December 21, 2005
Merry Christmas
I love Christmas. I always have. I love being off work and spending time with family. I enjoy eating a little too much. We’re excited because we leave tomorrow morning for our Christmas vacation. We’re going to spend about 11 days in Alabama visiting Tiffany’s mom, her sister, my parents, my sister (and her awesome family). Unfortunately we won’t be able to fit in a trip to visit the rest of Tiffany’s family in Florida. That’s bit of a bummer.
I enjoy seeing Christmas through the eyes and mind of Caleb, our two-year-old. The past three nights after dinner, we’ve poked around the neighborhood in the car looking at Christmas lights. On one occasion while seeing a really interesting display of lights, Tiffany said, “Oooh…stop Andy, stop Andy.” Now every time Caleb sees a neat display of lights, he says, “Look at those. Stop Andy, stop Andy, stop Andy.” He says it so fast it sounds like, “Topindy, topindy, topindy.” It doesn’t matter that the display is still half a block ahead, he still wants me to stop.
He also loves me telling the story the story of Jesus’ birth while acting it out with our little nativity scene characters. Our nativity set has the usual characters, but it also has some sheep and chickens. After I finish telling it he says, “More talk about story.” His favorite part of the story is when I embellish the period of time after Jesus is already born. The little figurine of Mary has one hand over her heart and the other hand stretched out just right so that she can hold the figurine of the chicken by the neck. So, I put the chicken in Mary’s hand and then shake Mary a little so that the chicken falls to the floor. I then talk about how after Jesus was born, Mary was hungry and needed to ring the chicken’s neck. If I leave this part of the story out, he asks me to put it back in. I hope God’s grace is big enough to cover my liberal paraphrasing of Scripture.
Caleb is loving Christmas this year. We’re trying to teach him about what we’re really celebrating at Christmas, but the real meaning is still pretty far out of his reach. I don’t want him to grow up not realizing why we celebrate Christmas.
It’s easy to forget why we are celebrating, isn’t it? We’re not celebrating the fact that Santa Claus came. We’re not celebrating our parents’ good food. Christmas is not even about celebrating family, as wonderful as family is.
No, Christmas is about celebrating God’s outrageous desire to be with us. He subjected himself to that humble birth in a stable all for the purpose of dying for us in the cruelest and most horrific ways. His entire life pointed to that event. We celebrate Christmas not because of Bethlehem where Jesus was born but because of Jerusalem, where He died and where He was resurrected. Those two events in Jerusalem paid the penalty of my sin and yours. That’s the good news.
We wish you a merry Christmas.
