Two years ago I wrote a blog post about Christmas. I wrote about the traditions we had in our family and how I hoped that they would continue. Well, now I'm at a completely different place in my life. That's what being in college is-a time of transitions. Soooo much has changed in the past two years. I got accepted into nursing school, graduated from UNI, started at nursing school, got married, live in a different town...etc. And that's just me personally. My friends have moved away, my brother has started college and lives closer to me than he has in the past four years, people all around me are beginning to have kids. I have a new family to share holidays with, and I love all them dearly!
I have the chance this Christmas to see that my traditions continue. My husband and I put up the Christmas tree (I hope that one day soon we can get a real tree, go out as a family and cut one down), we decorated the house, put lights up, made and decorated cookies...all the things that I wanted to continue, have. But there are new traditions that have been added. We will read the Christmas story together on Christmas Eve-something his family has always done. He bought me an ornament for the tree and said maybe buying one every year will become a tradition for us.
I want to instill the knowledge in my children that Christmas would not exist if not for Jesus. It would be rather stupid and extremely materialistic for humans to invent a holiday that creates stress in which the only point is to exchange gifts. I mean, most of us like spending time with family more than the gift giving aspect, but we don't need a holiday to do that.
We didn't create this holiday. It is here because Jesus was. It's here because God loved us enough to come down to earth. My husband pointed this out and its amazing if you think about it-Jesus (being part of the trinity) has been around forever. He has had angels singing to him and about him, about how holy and wonderful he is. He chose to leave that and not just be born to any human, but to a virgin. No one would have believed Mary-she would have been known as the woman who had sex before she was married (and that's saying it nicely). She could have been stoned, she was mocked and ridiculed. I'm sure Jesus grew up being teased about his mom. He left heaven where all was perfect, knowing that he was coming to an imperfect world.
Our King did this for us, and we choose to forget about him and remember the gifts, the lights, the tree, the cookies, the traditions, and everything else that we say makes this holiday worth our time. In the words of a song by Kutless, "What is christmas if there was no Savior wrapped in a manger? If the angels never sand 'Glory to the new born king'? What is Christmas without Christ?" We need to remember to keep Christ as the center of our focus this time of year an put Christ first in Christmas. Jesus is the part of the trinity that most of us relate to the best, and that's because he came down to live a human life. He cried, he was tempted, he got angry, many of the things that we deal with, Jesus did too. But he lived a perfect life and choose to die on the cross because he loved all of us that much!
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