Welcome back, friends, and happy New Year! It’s been a hot minute since we’ve connected.
Anything new and exciting happening in your life? Were the holidays everything you hoped they would be? Or are you like me, waking up from a holiday induced stupor wondering where the last two months have gone and how long the Reese’s Christmas Tree wrapper has been stuck to the backside of your robe?
If I’m being honest, the month of December is a struggle for me, though it hasn’t always been that way. Christmas was a magical time of year when I was a child. I spent hours looking through the Sears catalog, mesmerized myself as I stared at the twinkling lights on our simple tree, and baked fun treats to later dip in hot cocoa. Christmas was a time of innocence and anticipation.
Over the years, the season shifted. The innocence and anticipation slowly faded into a season of unrealistic expectations and pressure, so much pressure to manufacture the perfect Christmas celebration for our children. The perfect tree with perfect decorations. Gifts wrapped and ready for the perfect Christmas morning. Baked goods cooling on the rack, made by the perfect mom who smiled and hummed along as Bing Crosby sang of the perfectly executed holiday.
The Expectations of Christmas-Past
I couldn’t have done a better job setting myself up to be brutally disappointed if I’d tried, and I distinctly remember the afternoon it happened. Christmas 2006, the year that was, for me, the pinnacle of broken Christmas expectations.
Perhaps you can picture it. I was a young mom of three young children, ages 7, 3 and 17 months. Our home was on the market, which in retrospect was the fuel that fed my fire to have the perfect Christmas décor in our home. That afternoon, while my husband worked, the kids and I planned to put up the Christmas tree, and I just knew it would be as magical an afternoon as I’d experienced as a child. I’d already pressed play on the CD of Christmas music that would be the auditory backdrop for our Norman Rockwell afternoon.
O Holy Night playing softly on the stereo? Check!
Christmas tree and hand-selected decorations at the ready? Check!
Shattered expectations and an afternoon that would forever scar my illusions of Christmas magic? Check and check!
I still can’t pinpoint the moment in which the afternoon started heading in the wrong direction. Probably around the time I thought it would be a good idea to include three young children in my Christmas decorating plans, plans that had always erred on the side of OCD with tree fluffing and ornament placement. About an hour in, though, all pretense was lost, and by the time I waved the white flag, I was surrounded by broken ornaments and literal poop. See, while my 7-year-old was placing ornaments on the tree, my 3-year-old was pulling them off, stepping on them, and squealing in delight when they shattered. This was, apparently, just the distraction my 17-month-old needed to pull off all his clothes – and his diaper – and streak through the house spreading his holiday cheer all over our white carpet.
O. Holy. Night.
The Joy of Christmas-Present
That wasn’t the last year we put up a Christmas tree in our home, but it was the last year I went into it expecting the joy of Christmas-past. I wanted so badly to reproduce the magic of my childhood for them, and I tried, I really did. I lost that battle, and in the process, I lost a little of myself.
I lost the ability to see the joy of Christmas-present.
Deep in my heart, I knew Christmas was supposed to be peace and awe, happiness and beauty, but in reality, Christmas made me feel… less. Less of a good mom, less of a Christ-follower… just less. I felt this way for years. But even through my disenchantment with the season, I couldn’t let my expectations go. I continued to strive and strive, season after season, but I never found the “more” I was striving for. Overwhelmed by the season, I eventually concluded I wasn’t good enough.
Not good enough for Christmas.
About four years ago, I began to wonder. I wondered if Mary ever felt she wasn’t good enough for Christmas. I wondered if Joseph felt “less” as he held his newborn son for the first time. Their first Christmas was messy and poorly planned, completely lacking in a Norman Rockwell picture-perfect holiday spirit. Their next few Christmases couldn’t have been much better; they spent several years running from King Herod and the atrocities happening in their homeland.
As the years passed, though, and life began to normalize, did they feel a slow fade into pressure and expectations? Did they knock themselves out, gearing up for Jesus’ birthday with free shipping on Amazon, moving the Elf-on-the-shelf every night, placing their Walmart pickup orders for Christmas dinner and… secretly despising it all? Or were they able to see past all the trappings of Christmas and remember that Christmas is nothing more – and certainly nothing less – than God’s promise kept.
The Foundation of Christmas-Future
Read that sentence again, because that was the sentence that was an absolute game-changer for me four years ago. Yes, Jesus is the Reason for the Season, but you can believe that statement and still miss out on the joy of Christmas-present. I did, for years. Christmas is peace and awe, happiness and beauty, because Jesus is all of those things, but before that, Christmas was a promise kept.
That’s it. 400+ years of waiting for the prophesied Messiah… fulfilled. With a single stroke of His brush, God faced the canvas of humanity and painted a pure light shattering the dark oppression of His people. More than anything else, that was the definition of Christmas I needed. Not just to break free of the oppression of the holiday we’ve twisted for two millennia, but to break into the mindset of promises fulfilled by a faithful God with perfect timing.
I don’t do it perfectly, but it is upon this foundation that I now build my Christmas-future expectations. I know they will never be shattered. And when December rolls around again, I can and will celebrate that my God is a promise keeper.
O Holy Night, indeed.
Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise.
Hebrews 10:23 NLT
“For to us a Child shall be born, to us a Son shall be given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
Isaiah 9:6 AMP
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.
Isaiah 7:14 NIV
This is how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. His mother, Mary, had promised Joseph to be his wife, but while she was still a virgin she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Matthew 1:18 TPT