Knock, knock! Who’s there? Chris. Chris who? Christmas is here!
We know it is coming and yet for many of us, are we really ready? What are we shooting for? What is the purpose of all the hustle and bustle of the holidays? What is really important? What are our Priorities?
No doubt about it, I love the Holidays as much as anyone and yet there has seldom a year gone by when I wish I could have done more.
It has been said that Christmas is memories. It has also been said that Christmas is more than memories. One thing is certain, when Christmas is over, you will have memories.
The Question then is, what will they be? Will they be memorable, will they be significant, will they be all you hoped they would be?
I remember as a youth, laying on my back sliding up under the Christmas tree and looking at all the lights shining above me in the Tree. It looked magical. Almost as if there were multi colored stars above me in the sky.
I remember the first present my wife gave me. The gift of a Puppy my sister gave me and my first Christmas away from home, the cookies that arrived in the mail tasted like a bit of heaven.
I remember a year when we put hay under the trees and were blessed to have deer come into the yard. Eat and then bed down.
I remember gathering the children and family, dusting our various instruments off and going Instrument Christmas Caroling. Some years were cold. Some years it went well, others not so smooth, but always memorable.
There are the School and Church Christmas Performances we attend to watch, at first it was our children and now our Grandchildren.
There is my wife’s most meaningful activity which is the yearly unwrapping on Christmas Eve, of Pajamas painstakingly sewn by her for what started out as four children and now has grown to include 14 Grandchildren.
Recently as we discussed with the Grandchildren the scheduling of holiday events, I was surprised at how insistent they were about having the seasonal Ginger Bread House building activity. We don’t go to the effort of actually baking or using Ginger Bread, but rather we use Graham Crackers.
Each year we see a traditional looking gingerbread house emerge from the graham crackers but we have also seen many nontraditional creations such as a Star Wars Millennial Falcon, Light house, Nativity Scene, Log Cabins and more. Who knows what we will see this year?
Just as memorable as the other events has been the puppet nativity presentations. Most of these have not been flawless but each memorable. Of most importance to me has been the telling each year of how the Christmas Story guided my Mother to an understanding and relationship with God.
All of those things contributed to someone’s hustle and bustle, perhaps even to their Stress, but were they worth it? YES, they have been. The question is what memories will you create?
