Taking Time For Christmas

Sometimes you just have to wonder what kind of madness takes hold of people at this, the most wonderful and supposedly Christlike time of year. People drive crazier, lose their patience easier, show less care for their fellow man, care more about trampling people over to get that last gift that their child just has to have. What has gone wrong? It madness!
Then when you think all is lost, someone turns to you in the mile-long line you've been patiently standing in for eternity, smiles and starts up a cheerful conversation. Or the person in front of you in the mile-long line makes it to the register, smiles at the stressed out cashier and says, "Wow, I'll bet you're pretty beat," showing empathy for the worker who can now smile back in return because he or she has now been shown kindness instead of impatience. It is so easy to let ourselves become overwhelmed by the business of the season, trying to do everything that needs to be done and take care of everything we need to take care of, but in doing this we sometimes lose sight of what is truly important. We lapse in our knowledge of what this season is truly all about.
We need to make sure Christ is truly in our Christmas, that He is the focal point of our celebration of the season, His birth, His life, and His sacrifice. Christ is who we worship, and He is the reason we are here, and because of His gift to us, we know this life is not the end, it is only the beginning.
If we remember these things, our Christmas will indeed be a blessed one, There is no way it cannot be. And as Linus says to his friend after relating the story of the nativity, "That is what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."

More of My Must Read Favorites

Book: Grace
Author: Richard Paul Evans

She was my first kiss. My first love. She was a little match girl who could see the future in the flame of a candle. She was a runaway who taught me more about life than anyone has before or since. And when she was gone my innocence left with her.

As I begin to write, a part of me feels as if I am awakening something best left dead and buried, or at least buried. We can bury the past, but it never really dies. The experience of that winter has grown on my soul like ivy climbing the outside of a home, growing until it begins to tear and tug at the brick and mortar.

I pray I can still get the story right. My memory, like my eyesight, has waned with age. Still, there are things that become clearer to me as I grow older. This much I know: too many things were kept secret in those days. Things that never should have been hidden. And things that should have.

Book: The Twilight Series
Author: Stephanie Meyer

This stunning set, complete with five editions of Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, and The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella, makes the perfect gift for fans of the bestselling vampire love story.

Deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful, The Twilight Saga capture the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires.