Christmas is over, but I bet many of you still have your trees and decorations up! What is it about this year? It’s been a rough one and I, for one, just hate to see the joy and sheer delight of the season come to an end. This Christmas – more than others – has been a wonderful diversion from all the craziness going on! So – just to hang on for one more week, here are some holiday tidbits to extend your season a bit.
Stockings, pickles, indoor trees, reindeer and elves – Christmas has some surprising customs that are associated solely with this unique holiday. I’m sure most of you have some family traditions that, upon thinking back, make you smile more than others! And perhaps you even made new ones this year.
Our children always loved unpacking their sleeping bags and camping out under the Christmas tree – gifts piled high, lights twinkling – it doesn’t get much better than that. One family had their kids leave the traditional cookies & milk for Santa and then not only ate the goodies after the kids went to sleep, but then left Santa shoe prints (from flour) beside the food tray. It was absolute “proof” that Santa had visited the night before. More memories! Another family watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas one year and the kids decided that instead of a beautiful lighted star for their tree topper, they needed an Allosaurus – one of the large dinosaurs weighing up to 2.5 tons and growing up to 32 feet in length. Their thinking was that even a plastic model would help protect the gifts from the Grinch. So up it went – looked a bit odd having a large dinosaur sitting atop their tree, but the gifts stayed safe! New memories!!
There are many holiday traditions we observe each year without even thinking about them. Probably the most central of these is the Christmas date itself. Historians pretty much now agree that Jesus wasn’t born anywhere near December 25th. For starters, we know that shepherds were out in the fields watching their flocks, but shepherds were never out in the fields during the cold and rainy month of December. Scholars suggest there is evidence that Jesus may have been born in the summer or early fall. I don’t think the exact date matters to God – the world settled upon December 25th and that day got set apart even in the hearts and minds of non-believers. Let’s chalk one up for global joy!
On a holiday side note, did you know that there are over 20,000 “rent-a-Santa’s” across the United States each year?! Santa can make up to $500 an hour, but your normal, run-of-the-mill mall Santa’s earn around $30 an hour. And the Santa job is an important one as it pulls in people for shopping. It’s reported that American consumers spent more than $1 trillion for Christmas this year. But I’m with Bill Keane on this one: “God put Santa Claus on earth to remind us that Christmas is supposed to be a happy time.” Go Santa!
And, have you heard that the largest gingerbread house ever made was the size of a real home? In 2013, a group from Texas – where else? – constructed a real gingerbread house. Made with a wood base, it took 1,800 lbs of butter, 7,200 eggs, 3,000 lbs of sugar, 7,200 lbs of flour and over 22,000 pieces of candy to cover the record-breaking structure. All that to celebrate Xmas! But wait! Xmas? Yes – some folks are offended by the term “Xmas,” but actually, the letter “X” in Greek is the first letter of Christ, and “Xmas” has been used as an abbreviation for Christmas since the mid-1500s.
Disney came through on this one, celebrating Xmas with 150 semi-trailer truckloads of decorations, stringing 15 miles of garland and 8.5 million lights, hanging 1,314 wreaths and decorating some 1,300 trees with 300,000 yards of ribbon! Joy to the World – even our theme parks love Christmas! As Hamilton Mabie remarked, “Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.”
But let’s never forget that Christmas is about the giving of a Savior to mankind – something we should be celebrating year-round. Someone once referred to this as the “great encounter, the historical encounter, between God and man.” Hopefully, we didn’t allow the busy season to misdirect our focus from what really mattered most, our main gift – Jesus!
In the end – I hope you loved your Christmas day – it’s over until 2022. Let’s pray that truly this coming year will bring greater peace on earth and goodwill to men.
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Bob and Susan Beckett pastor The Dwelling Place City Church at 27100 Girard Street in Hemet, CA. For more information, you may contact them at DPCityChurch.org
Susan Beckett | Dwelling Place City Church
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