It is no secret that Christmas can be one of the most hectic times of the year. Christmas parties. Christmas decorations. Christmas cards. Christmas presents. Christmas with his family. Christmas with her family. Christmas church service. Christmas music. Christmas advertising. Christmas shopping.
It’s like the day after Thanksgiving (or in this year’s case, the week before Thanksgiving), time switches to warp speed and before we know it we’re watching the ball drop in New York on the TV and we’re telling our co-workers Happy New Year.
And every year, I see the blog posts and Facebook statuses and news stories and internet articles that talk about how to have a “stress-free Christmas”. I will be upfront with you: this is not going to be one of those posts. Because at the end of the day, what you do or do not accomplish during the holiday season really has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas. Not that any of it is necessarily bad, it’s just that the majority of it really has no eternal significance.
I am much more concerned with the true meaning of Christmas: the celebration of Christ’s birth.
Even though we do not know the exact day He was born, the purpose of Christmas is to reflect on the birth of our Savior; to remember all that He did for us when He stepped out of His realm and into a human body. When Divinity traded his crown for a tiny manger in a dirty stable, purely out of His love for us.
This year, Christmas has been a little different for me. Yes, I’ve bought some gifts. Yes, we’ve already sent out our Christmas cards. Yes, I have a tree in my house and decorations scattered throughout the living room. But my heart has been longing for something much deeper: a true connection with the meaning of Christmas. A longing to celebrate what Christmas day means for not only Christians, but all of humanity. This year, all of the other “fluff” that we add to Christmas really hasn’t been all that important to me. I’ve been humming Silent Night and O Come, O Come Emanuel. I’ve thought about what it would have been like to hold Jesus as a baby, to watch Him grow into a man, to know that the Lord was standing right before my very eyes.
As I reflected on some of this last week, I decided to do a blog series about it. This is not a series on how to have a fun Christmas, or how to make new memories with your family. This is a series that will hopefully bring some of us back to the true meaning of Christmas….that will hopefully cause us to stop and pause and rejoice in the miracle of Christ’s birth.
I hope that you will join me over the next week and a half as I delve into the Christmas story. I will be posting one short blog post every day leading up to Christmas. And if you enjoy the series, please share it with your friends and family. Let’s bring back the true meaning of Christmas together. Because Jesus truly is the reason for the season!
"And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn." ~Luke 2:7
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