What Makes it FEEL Like Christmas?

It snowed last night and it felt like Christmas waking up and walking out in the cold air with a thin veil of snow crunching beneath my feel.

But it won’t be here long. It’s supposed to get up to 50 tomorrow. Will it still feel like Christmas?

What puts you in the Christmas spirit? Shopping? Putting the tree up? Wrapping gifts? A Christmas concert? Family and friends gathering? The snow falling?

I love all of those things…minus the shopping.

But I’ve had a lot of beautiful Christmases, with and without those ingredients.

One year we didn’t do gifts and gave everything we were going to spend on them for a missions project. At the time, our kids said it was there best Christmas ever. For a couple of Christmases, we not only had no snow, but spent Christmas in hot weather…once in Hawaii and twice in Florida. I’ll never forget the Baptist church Christmas Eve service we went to in Maui where two women did a Hula to “Silent Night.” Sounds humorous I know, but it was beautiful.

I like most of the elements we associate with Christmas, but if they aren’t there, Christmas is still Christmas to me. One year when in college, I worked all night Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as a security guard. I remember making my rounds and seeing a mom and dad sneaking gifts down the stairway to the tree. I had no family or friends surrounding me, no tree of my own, and no Christmas music playing. But during my break I read the Christmas story. It was a memorable Christmas that I look back at with fondness.

If you take Jesus out of it, it’s just winter solstice.

I think traditions are healthy and this can be a wonderful time of year (as the song goes). But if you take Jesus out of it, it’s just a winter solstice with fabricated cheer. 

But when you really ponder on the Christian tradition of celebrating Jesus’ birth (there is recent evidence that the date may in fact, correspond to Jesus’ birth), the holiday takes on meaning that transcends anything else traditional. 

Think of it…God became a man (Immanuel). God…The Creator…he joined the human race! If that really happened (and of course I believe it did), everything else pales. If the Creator of the universe became a helpless baby dependent on a poor teenage girl to care for him, that is the most profound action that anyone could celebrate on any holiday, outside of what it eventually accomplished in our reconciliation with God…but that’s the result of this incredible event: the incarnation.

What makes it feel like Christmas for you? I really hope its the Christmas Story!