Christmas - Come and Gone

I love Christmas! I love everything about it - the planning, the shopping for gifts for everyone in the family. What fun I would have if I had unlimited resources to buy for everyone! We watched a cute movie on the BYU Channel the other night - the Christmas Angel. We talked about how incredible it would be to go around helping people anonymously - paying for missed house payments, medical bills, helping with whatever needs they had. I'd love to play Santa Claus every day of the year.

I love the Christmas carols - the traditional songs. I don't like the crazy songs - Gramma and the reindeer, missing teeth, etc. I could play Christmas music all year. Who doesn't love the Hallelujah Chorus and Carol of the Bells and Silver Bells and the beautiful hymns we get to sing on Sunday in church!

I love setting up my nativity sets at the Creche Festival showing how different countries celebrate Christmas with their version of the nativity. Then bringing them home and decorating my house with them - book shelves, end tables, coffee table - every flat surface gets a nativity set.  I'm so grateful to my international traveling kids who bring me back beautiful depictions of the birth of the Christ child from nations across the world.

I love my blue and silver Christmas tree. There is such peace sitting in the soft glow of lights and pondering the magnificent gift our loving Father sent in his Beloved Son to live and die for us. What a miracle in our lives that is!

I love making mounds of caramel corn, then delivering it to neighbors and friends to tell them we are thinking of them at Christmas. I love receiving Christmas cards from friends scattered across the world and reliving so many fond memories of our times together. I don't even mind writing in all those cards!!

I love planning special music for sacrament meetings in December to help everyone remember the meaning of Christmas. What power there is in music to bring the Spirit to a meeting! The messages seem so much more uplifting at this time of year.

And I love the day after Christmas when all the kids and grand kids have gone home and the house is quiet once again. The chaos is over. Wrapping paper and boxes are put away for another year. Peace and order are restored. We can sit quietly and bask in the glow of loving family, a loving Father in Heaven and our Savior who makes all this happiness possible.