Family Life

Everything is gearing up for Christmas. The shops have their decorations out, the sales are on, crowds throng to the malls. You can get a picture of your child sitting on Santa’s lap! A week ago was the Santa parade, the sidewalks packed with children and their parents. And it’s not even December.

Daniel has certainly caught on to the festive season. He avidly browses through the toy ads in the newspaper, excitedly running to show us something that caught his fancy. He’s looking forward to his Christmas gifts, and has them all picked out at the local WalMart.

It seems to me that the commercial Christmas rush started earlier this year, and in the frenzied flurry of activity that is Christmas shopping, it’s sad to see not a single ad or poster or notice for Christ’s birth, the arrival of the promised Messiah, God with us.

It worries me more that my kids have so quickly grasped the world’s associations of Christmas, and haven’t even considered God’s original purpose for sending his Son. Sure, they know all the Bible stories: original sin, Christ’s birth, the angel’s announcement, the wise men, Jesus’ arrest, trial, execution, burial and resurrection. Daniel can recite all these from memory. But they have no mental connection between any of that and the Christmas we’ll soon be celebrating.

So I need a plan. It’ll involve talking to the boys, training them to identify what is of the world and what is of God, changing attitudes (starting with Debbie and I) about what is truly valuable at Christmas, planning activities that focus on Christ’s birth. I don’t know exactly how we’ll go about it, and I suspect this will be something we’ll have to work on every year.

It is the first of many occasions as the boys grow up to tell them, This is how the world lives, but this is how God intends us to live.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 5:00 pm. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.