Depending on when you get the newsletter, Christmas is only about three or four days away! Is it just me, or does Christmas come more quickly each year?

If I’m honest, I think that’s a sign of getting a bit older. Remember when you were a kid and the time between each Christmas was an eternity? Now we can’t believe it is here again already!

There is really no excuse, though, for feeling like Christmas has snuck up on us. After all, some retailers didn’t even wait for Halloween to announce that it was coming. That alone should have given us fair warning. Still, Christmas preparations always seem to involve more time than we allot.

Whether you are scrambling to cross off the last items on your “to do” list or have been ready for Christmas for weeks now, I hope you have a good Christmas this year. And, by the way, having a “good Christmas” doesn’t mean you have gotten everything
done. It doesn’t mean that your house looks like Martha Stewart lives there.

This is an important disclaimer because the secular/retail gods would like to impose their own definition of a “good Christmas”. In fact, you will hear that phrase in the financial news regularly right now. A “good Christmas” means sales have gone up from last
year.

This can even invade our family life. When children are asked if they had a “good Christmas”, they often respond by listing “what they got”.

So maybe it is worth saying what a “good Christmas” is. When I say that I hope you have a good Christmas, I mean that I hope you have time with family and friends. I hope you see kids’ faces alive with absolute wonder. I hope you have good food and great stories to tell. I hope you feel the nearness of God and holiness of Christmas story of Bethlehem. I hope you appreciate the unlikely way that God chose to come into the world and the hope and joy that this gives to us all; especially the downtrodden. I hope you experience the rekindling of a light inside you that is a reminder of the holiness out of which you were created—a light that cannot and will not ever leave you.

I hope you have a good Christmas, indeed.

See you in church,
–Rev. Dominic