TIME IS FLYING!...since I last wrote, we have been to Franklin, TN to visit one of our daughters and her family. Life seems to get quite busy. I always have such mixed feelings at this time of year. It reminds me of past Christmases with family members who are either no longer alive or who were healthier, times when our family was together instead of spread all over the world, times when old friends were closer geographically.

The harder I try to maintain some family traditions, the more difficult it seems to be. I miss them and more than that, I miss the people we made them with. We had very few traditions, but they were ours--pizza on Christmas eve; reading scripture together on Christmas Eve (often after a Christmas Eve service); opening gifts on Christmas Eve, enjoying some unexpected gift concoction that Christy would come up with (one year it was anonymously delivered gifts with names on wrong gifts revealed after we opened them:); I liked the fruitcake tradition that was started when we lived in Jamaica, but the family really didn't. It was like no other fruitcake you have eaten because i dislike candied fruit, so I substituted dried fruit for it and put it in a dark fruitcake cake batter. In Jamaica, it seemed that EVERYONE made fruitcake and soaked it in rum or brandy (ugh! to the brandy ones). i really liked mine. Now it seems like so much effort for so little enjoyment. I may try it one more time, but it hardly seems worth the effort when everyone seems to complain about it. i guess to me, it is a memory of a wonderful time of my life (along with others) where I learned a lot, when our babies were coming and they were learning so much, of Robbie and Judy and Jennifer and Michael and Jeff and Miriam and Bobbie and Marilyn and Walford and Jenn and a LOT of good times and patient people!

Come to think of it, that may be what the many traditions we have at Christmas do for us...they remind us of the people who started them with us, or the ones who passed them down to us or the people we shared them with. Maybe that is why it is so hard to get rid of the really useless ones. I guess when we are developing the Christmas traditions we will use in our family...or which ones we will continue to keep and which we will jettison, it is good to think about what we really are passing on. Which are the traditions that pass on the true meaning of Christmas to our children/grandchildren? Those we will want to keep. Which contradict what we WANT to pass on about Christmas, Advent and Christ's first Coming? We will need to jettison those. What new traditions can we start that will make it clearer to our children/grandchildren...and ourselves, what Christmas is all about? Maybe this Christmas is the year to start some of them.

So as you can tell, I get very sentimental this time of year. I rebel against all the rushing and hurrying to get the perfect gift. We already have it--Christ! I don't take enough time to stop and enjoy Him and the complete sufficiency of the gift He gave us of Himself and His substitutionary death on the cross for our sin...and of course, His powerful resurrection from the dead and victory over sin and death.

God help you as you seek to worship Him this year with your Christmas celebrations.