The Humble Season

Christmas is a very humble season. It is a time to gather all of our family around us and celebrate the blessings of kinship. We go from celebration to celebration to enjoy our children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts. There is merry laughter (I would say gay laughter but . . .). We have warm fire places and cold drinks. Life is good, just like the very first Christmas when Mary and Joseph and Jesus, . . . and sheep, . . . and those persons who didn’t have room, . . . and maybe a sheep dog . . .

It is a very humble season. I love Christmas. I put strings of lights on the house, in the yard, and on the tree. My wife and I drive around the neighborhoods to see lots of houses with red, green, blue, white, and red, and green lights and stuff. There are light-up reindeer, and wreathes, and Mickey Mouse, and Winnie Pooh, and light-up manger scenes that remind us of that first Christmas when Mary and Joseph and Jesus had . . . a star . . . and maybe a lamp . . . and light in the window of that inn . . .

The humble season of Christmas is expressed with gifts. I remember one year getting a toy shotgun and rabbit that ran on batteries. It was great until the rabbit ended up on the floor furnace. But, Christmases are made up of memories of special gifts all wrapped up in beautiful paper and ribbon. Lots and lots of present getting and giving is what makes Christmas special, just like that first Christmas when the wisemen brought the baby Jesus some great gifts, even if they were about a year late, . . . and just before all of those babies were killed.

Maybe the most humble moment of Christmas is when we set aside the “twas the night before Christmas” and pick up the Bible; when we get still and stop thinking about ourselves to listen to someone read from Luke chapter two. “When the angels had gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds began saying to one another, Let us go straight to Bethlehem then, and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to us. So they came in a hurry and found their way to Mary and Joseph, and the baby as He lay in the manger.” It is when our eyes become misty upon hearing again the wonderful story of God’s great love, and for a brief moment we can’t see the lights and the gifts and even family members next to us, but only see Christ, that the humble season of Christmas is filled with real joy, and The Light, and the greatest gift ever.