There are 363 shopping days until Christmas! The annual celebration has come and gone – most homes will remain in holiday mode until at least January first. In our home, the decorations and tree stay up until after the first. But the reality of Christmas 2010 begins to fade and hopefully we have a few months before the barrage of advertisements start for Christmas 2011! As you reflect on 2010 – what was your best present? For dads everywhere, Christmas used to mean staying up the night before assembling bicycles and wagons. Today, it’s an electronic game we couldn’t understand even if we tried. I’m not sure I like that trade off, but what are you going to do? This year what was your favorite present? I’ll save my favorite present for a future blog – but I will say it was fun to sit around the Christmas tree watching my kids open their gifts. What a joy to see their faces light up, first in anticipation and then in discovery as wrapping paper and boxes gave way to new shoes and new video games. Sometimes gifts end up blessing more than just the recipient. My sister Becca got a new “toy” for Christmas. She can now turn negative (anyone remember those) or slides (OK now I’m really dating myself) into perfect digital images. We’ve been discovering pictures that we have long since forgotten about and in some cases didn’t even know existed! What fun.

 

One of those fun pictures Becca's "toy" has resurrected from yesteryear ~ this is Kelli's dad George being taught the Tahitian at our wedding reception. Poor guy; he had no idea what his daughter had gotten him into this time!

Hopefully, this Christmas season, you have experienced the best present of all – not just for 2010, but for all time! Of course I mean Jesus. I hope you had great opportunity this past weekend to enjoy Jesus – in prayer, in your reading or in living your normal life. If Christmas has come and gone, and you don’t know what I’m talking about I hope you will find someone who will share the true meaning of Christmas.

If you’ve grown up in the USA you’ve probably heard the story about Jesus’ birth, you’ve seen images, maybe attended a church musical. But when baby Jesus was born 2000 years ago he was on a mission. The plan from the beginning was to be our savior, not just a figure in a nativity scene. If you are a parent it’s hard to keep your kids focused on the true meaning of Christmas. We’ve offered in some of our blogs suggestions for doing that – like creating family traditions. Unless you have an unlimited budget, you can’t compete with the marketing out there. Eventually “your” Christmas presentation will lose out to Wal-Marts or CBS or Coca-Cola or MTV. Glitz and glitter won’t keep our kids attention like traditions. As your kids age rituals that would normally be “cheesy” are loved because the meaning attached to it. In fact, the older your kids get, the more they want to maintain those “old fashioned” practices your family has.

 

While the world spends billions of dollars convincing us to think selfishly – make sure you create traditions that celebrate Jesus, and family, and loving other people. We watched Toy Story 3 last night as a family. What a fun story to share with the kids, but in real life toys do wear out and eventually get discarded. We lose pieces to our games and electronics stop working. The best present of all was Jesus; so anything that causes our kids to reflect on that is good. Anything that causes them to reflect back on Christmas and its true meaning is even better. I didn’t want to bid farewell to Christmas 2010 without wishing all of you a very blessed and merry Christmas. May the face of Jesus shine on you long after the Christmas decorations are taken down. Thanks for visiting our blog and we hope you return as we head into 2011.