It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas everywhere I go.  Shops have had their festive decorations up for quite some time.  Every time you go into town you can see people carrying boxes, wrapping paper and all things to do with the Christmas season.  As far as I am concerned, the cards have been bought and written - well most of them anyway.  Some need to be posted early to go abroad, others to different parts of the UK and others I can deliver by hand locally.  Presents are either bought or ordered.  Some are already wrapped but still quite a lot to do.  Tomorrow (Sunday) is the first Sunday of Advent.  The last day of November is when I usually sort out the tree and decorations ready to be in place for the 1st of December.  So I guess you could say 'it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas'.  Or is it?  At least it's like what we in the west have made it become.

It's actually nothing like the very first Christmas.  How different!  There was no tinsel or decorations, no turkey dinner with family, no relaxing and being entertained.  The King of Kings was not surrounded by servants or lived in a palace with all the comforts of the hierarchical, rich lifestyle of those in authority.  Paul in his letter to the Philippians describes it as God emptying himself into the physical, human presence of his son.  This emptying was expressed by being born illegitimately to a young teenager in a place that was kept for the animals.  No family or friends to visit and celebrate.  Instead he was visited by lowly workers doing the night shift and foreigners who probably didn't even speak the same language as Mary and Joesph.  The subsequent years of his infancy were spent as a refugee, an asylum seeker, an immigrant in a foreign land.  He knew from experience what it was like to be hungry and a stranger and to be fed and accepted and taken in.  He had lived life in the lowly margins of society.  He emptied himself until there was no more to give.  

Having said all that, I do love Christmas and I love to celebrate as we do now with decorations, great food and exchanging of presents with loved ones.  And I don't suggest for one minute that we should stop doing that.  Be happy, enjoy time with family and friends, taste the good food, relax and enjoy the break but spare a thought for those who maybe have to work over the holidays.  Be thankful for what we have but remember that there are some who don't have a place to stay or family to share Christmas dinner with.  Some people now, instead of sending and posting Christmas cards, are giving the money they would have spent on that to a charity in order to help feed the hungry or give a bed to the homeless.  I must admit that I haven't done that, (I like the idea of greeting friends with a card) but I admire those who do. 

An activity that many engage in over the months leading up to Christmas is the filling of a shoebox with goodies to send to a child in some far away place.  This week I read of a young Filipino girl who 14 years ago received a shoebox at Christmas sent from a young boy in America through the very well known Operation Christmas Child scheme.  She was so grateful for that gift that she later tried to contact the boy to thank him.  She was unsuccessful but later in life, she was able through the social media to make contact with him .  Their friendship grew until recently they got married and for wedding presents they requested that people donate shoeboxes for the charity to continue the work that had brought them together.  You can read the full story here.

I guess that to make it really look like Christmas, we should enjoy the festivities but also give something of ourselves, empty out a little of the much that we have in order to help others, a kind of antidote to the madness of Black Friday.  That is the real message of Christmas and what God meant Christmas to look like.  'Insomuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me.'  Emmanuel - God emptying himself into every walk of life for all people everywhere.  That really is something to celebrate!