This Christmas, we have a baby in our house once again. That means for the next several years, Christmas will be an especially fun time for our family. We haven’t had small children in our home for quite a few years and that absence has made Christmas feel somewhat incomplete.
It’s not that we haven’t enjoyed our Christmases as our older two have begun to grow up. But once the children learn the truth about Ol’ Saint Nick and move into late childhood and adolescence, Christmas looses some of its mystery and magic.
I’m not exactly sure when Christmas lost its spell for me—somewhere around age twelve, I think. While I enjoyed Christmas the following years, I didn’t recapture that special feeling of childhood excitement until Amy and I had children of our own. Then as they grew, Christmas again began to diminish.
Adults struggle to feel the wonder and awe. We become jaded. We’ve done the routine many times. Presents don’t excite us like they did. Decorations you pull out of the attic year after year (with what seems like increasing rapidity) don’t have the same ability to create a mood. We no longer count the days to Christmas; we count shopping days (which is quite a different thing).
For adults to get in the spirit of Christmas, it takes the presence of a child. We experience the wonder and mystery through the eyes of our children or grandchildren, nieces or nephews. As we see the newness and the splendor of the holiday in their eyes, we again vicariously share in the feeling we remember from our own childhood.
To me it makes perfect sense that Christmas needs a child to be complete. Christmas is, after all, about a child. It is about welcoming a mysterious child into our world— God’s gift to us. In return, we give gifts to the child and each other as grace becomes the order of the day. Christmas is a taste of the surprise of delight Christ brings to our drab and monotonous fallen world. In Christ’s presence, every moment is like Christmas to a child.
So this Christmas, try to experience the delight of the season through the eyes of a child and remember why we have Christmas. Remember, the same wonder will be ours in overflowing abundance at every moment when Christ comes for a second time— not as a child, but for those who have become child-like so they may enter the Kingdom of heaven.