My Favorite Things

Well, first off I would like to wish you all Merry Christmas!

My family is one that gets very excited about the approach of Christmas. So excited, in fact, that we make up what the days before are. A couple of years ago, my mom came up with the idea that the day before Christmas Eve must be Christmas Adam, because Adam came before Eve.

So now, instead of saying that it is four days until Christmas, we say that it's only two days until Christmas Adam (somehow that makes it feel like Christmas is closer). *Just so you know, tomorrow is Christmas Fish*. 


All jokes aside, Christmas is amazing.

Yet, what surprises me most is that the actual day of Christmas is my least favorite part of it. For me, it's the Christmas caroling and Christmas pageants, the cookie baking and time spent shopping with family, picking out and decorating a tree, going to a Christmas Eve service. . . Not all, I'll admit, but most of the things on my list tend to go along with glorifying God.

With Christmas caroling, you get to not only sing songs praising Him, but it's also an amazing opportunity to show God's love to those you sing to. With Christmas pageants, you get to re-tell the story of Christ's birth. With cookie baking, you are taking time aside to spend with your family to make cookies to give away (of course, we all know that not all of them wind up being given to someone ;) ) , time spent shopping normally involves putting others before yourself and picking out something they would like as opposed to just getting something for yourself. Picking out a tree can also be glorifying God--marveling at His creation.

Then, when you go to a Christmas Eve service, you sing classic Christmas songs like Silent Night and Away in a Manger, Come all Ye Faithful. . . You hear the pastor discuss Christ's birth--and though it is a message that a lot of people have heard to many times to count, still leaves the same effect.

Christ--God's Son--coming into this world.

Not because He had to, but because He wanted to. He wanted a way to be closer to His people--He wanted to sanctify them and make them pure.

He came because He loves us.

And, unfortunately, that isn't exactly what I think about on Christmas Day. I think about all of the things I got, I get angry about the things I didn't. I get impatient when at the family events because they are taking too long to get to the gifts.

Then, at the end of the day, I look at the mess my house has become. Wrapping paper everywhere,  gifts thrown this way and that, and I let out a sigh.

Gifts will pass away--they will break, get lost, get left somewhere, thrown out, get burnt. . . Because they weren't meant to last forever.

Yet what Christ did for us--that is something that was meant to last forever. Literally.

I would put the Christmas story on this post (Luke 1-2), but it's already getting quite lengthy. . .But I will encourage you to check it out. It's a story thousands of years in the making.


~Elizabeth