Preparing for a Meaningful Christmas

Today is the biggest shopping day of the year. It is that make or break time of year for retailers from local mom and pop shops to multinational corporations. Will we, the consumers, spend with abandon or hold back like miserly old Scrooge? Storeowners are standing by anxiously to see how this post-traumatic holiday season will go. It’s beginning to look a lot like another consumer Christmas.

Would you like to have a different kind of Christmas? You can have a more meaningful holiday season and it won’t depend in the least on how much or how little you have to spend. In the holiday rush, it is easy to loose the meaning of Christmas. Sometimes Christmas gets packaged as the season of giving. Perhaps that is so. But, the meaning of Christmas has nothing to do with finding the perfect present for everyone on your gift list.

The meaning of Christmas is the gift that God gave to us in coming to live among us as one of us. That fully human, fully God baby called Jesus was the gift of “God with us.” Connecting to that true Christmas story will help you find meaning and purpose amongst the holiday rush.

Meaning and purpose. They probably are not on your Christmas wish list, which is just as well, because they are not available in any store. But in the hectic pace that seems to consume us all from Thanksgiving to New Years, meaning and purpose may be the thing you need the most.

Try making room in your life this holiday season for a baby wrapped in bits of torn cloth and lying in a feed box. The Christmas story is the most amazing of tales. God the creator does not stand back and look at the creation from afar, like a painter gazing at a painting on a gallery wall. God entered the creation. Not in glory, but in humility, as a baby born in a cave used for a barn. We call this baby Jesus our King, but he was like no other king the earth has known. Making his story part of your story will help you find real meaning and purpose for your life.

The four weeks leading up to Christmas are the traditional church season of Advent. Advent means “coming” in Latin. The name remembers Jesus coming the first time at Christmas, but Advent is also a time of preparation for Jesus coming again in glory.

Here are a few concrete suggestions for preparing for Christmas. Try any or all of these to ground the Christmas madness to its deeper meaning:

Get an Advent calendar. Available in many stores, an Advent calendar marks off the days from December 1 to December 25, often with a chocolate, or other prize, for each day. As you open each days’ window on the calendar, remind yourself (and your family) that Christmas is a time for remembering “God with us.”

Set up a Nativity scene. Nativities date back to the thirteenth century when St. Francis began the first live nativity as an early multimedia presentation of the Christmas story. To make your own nativity scene more meaningful, hold back the baby Jesus until Christmas morning and let the three wise men make their appearance on the twelfth day of Christmas (January 6). That sense of anticipation is what the time leading up to Christmas should be about.

Try an Advent wreath service in your home. An Advent wreath has four candles on a wreath surrounding a fifth candle. The candles of the wreath begin four weeks before Christmas, with a new candle added every week. Finally, the central Christ candle is lit on Christmas reminding us of the light of God’s love coming into the world through the person of Jesus.

Reading scripture each night as you light a candle is a way to connect the time of preparation for Christmas to the Bible. A simple Advent wreath service, with suggested daily scripture readings, is available online at www.kingofpeace.org/advent/

These three simple suggestions will add about five minutes to your day. Those few minutes can make all the difference by grounding the mad rush of the holidays to its true meaning. Make room for the Christmas story in the weeks leading up to December 25 and you may find the deeper meaning of the holiday is the best Christmas gift of all.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)