Twenty-Four - Merry Christmas Eve!

My series of pre-Christmas postings has come to end here with this last post. It's been fun exploring random thoughts my mind swirls up.

Christmas musings. Easy to elicit, easy to express. Warm fuzzies, egg nog, evergreens, and children scrubbed clean.

Jolly old elf with attitude just right to bring out the kind and generous in even the grinchiest scrooge.

Pensive hearts turn to the babe in the manger, celebrating his birthday which isn't really his birthday, he was born in the summer, but hey, we're too busy playing in the sun, planting gardens, and grilling meat then. Besides, how can summer compete with snow - or dreams of it - and woolly hats and scarves, wassail and cocoa, nuts and fruits, and hands and noses warming by crackling fires?

It's the coziness, the inwardness that creates the Christmas glow, I think. When looking out the window through precipitation's designs one is comforted to be nestled safely inside, encouraged with the choice to suit up and explore the outdoors' cold and wet, bright stars, descending snowflakes, visual evidence of one's breath, or to remain inside to explore games with children, victuals leisurely prepared, arts, crafts, projects long undone, and napping. Sweet, guilt-free napping! Because the earth is asleep she needs less tending by we mere mortals which affords us the opportunity to turn thoughts more toward wants and less toward needs.

(Yes, there are those who celebrate Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere amidst summer. They probably feel as sorry for us as we do for them.)

Back to the babe in the manger. Here is where it doesn't matter if one is in shorts or snow suit because Jesus came just the same. To satisfactorily contemplate the meaning of His life - and death - would take a thousand Christmases.

But today we have this one, this Christmas, this remembrance of God invading human life with a message of hope, of love, of rescue. A thinking person owes it to himself to ponder who Jesus was - and is - for this unusual Jewish man cannot be simply ignored. History tells us he was amazing.

This Christmas Eve my heart turns with focus to the God I worship throughout the year. The celebration adds a sacredness, a space to absorb what I know and how I feel. That fellow human beings all over the globe celebrate with me adds to the quiet, the opportunity, for together we take deep breaths and realize that something extraordinary happened in that stable 2000 years ago. God began anew his conversation with mankind.

And I, for one, am listening.