May Your Christmas be Merry and White and Bright [With Sugar Plums and Jingle Bells and Herald Angels] Oh, and Joy to the World!

{by Hailey Sadler}
It's kind of a pity about Christmas.

I mean, there are some things I definitely LOVE about Christmas: family traditions, picking out a perfect tree, the excuse to eat lot’s of cookies and drink things like salted caramel lattes and egg nog and Chic-Fil-A peppermint milkshakes [the best!]. And presents. I love presents.

But the pity about Christmas is inherent to the very nature of its celebration. It comes every year. We sing about it. Preach about it. Send cards because of it. [Each sporting pretty much the same twelve words just in different combinations.] We shop and watch movies and have parties because of it. For like a solid month. The pity about Christmas is that it has become so common. It has become so typical, so everyday, that I can sit in a church pew and listen to someone read the words, recorded in ancient times and passed down for generations, of the mind-blowing, world-shattering, reality-shifting, Christmas story and instead of being amazed I look at the preacher standing up to speak and think, “Ok, how is he going to make this interesting?” How could truth such as God Himself came to earth in the form of a little human baby to save the world from sin have become cliché? But it has.

It’s sad. That honestly the most monumental event in history [second only to the resurrection, basically] sometimes seems, if we admit it, kind of …boring now. Not surprising, anymore. Sometimes I wish I could hear the story for the first time again, or see it from someone’s eyes that were there when it happened, the unheard of, for the first time. 

I like to think of the shepherds, because unlike Mary and Joseph [who had been preparing their minds since the angels visits] or the wise men [who had been traveling along time, which always takes some of the excitement out of things… think long car ride...] the shepherds heard about it for the very first time in a burst of glory the very night it happened. [Or at least I like to imagine it that way, I know Biblical scholars can argue otherwise.]

But, outside of a Christmas pageant [and maybe not even then... I always had to be an angel] I doubt I’m going to get the shepherd experience. So we can do what we can, try read the story over with fresh eyes, glimpse the wonder, ask God to create a shepherd's experience in our hearts, and wrap our minds around the scope of the event that Christians now call Christmas. And then be grateful. Because whether or not the Christmas story seems cliche, it still changes our world, our lives, and our entire reality. Which is pretty cool, when you stop to think about it.

Now put that on a Christmas card.