Labeling Christmas Love

On the day after Christmas I arose at my pre-holiday wake-up time of six a.m. The family all gone, my seasonal duties done for another year, I was eager to get back into my regular writing routine, a pleasure I'd set aside out of necessity during the hurry and fuss of the holiday season. I signed onto my blog ready to finish the story I'd written and lived out during the holiday season but had been too busy to publish. Quickly I copied the text into the blank space waiting for the words, typed in a title, and selected the appropriate picture to go along with the post. Last on the list was the selection of a couple of labels, words that encapsulate what the message was all about so that others searching for stories by subject can easily find those that fit the bill. I limit the number of labels I use to three, both as an exercise in summarization and to reduce the length of the list of the same that scrolls along the right side of my blog. Done, I hit the button that would publish the work and then viewed my blog to see the finished result.

For some reason, the labels list caught my interest that morning. It takes some perseverance to find it, as it appears last on the blog screen, buried under the snippets from other blogs I follow. It's interesting that the labels are listed in a font size relative to the number of posts pertaining to that subject, making it easy to see at a glance what subjects are the passions of my heart. I laughed as I looked at the list; the words Christmas and love jumped out at me as having been the most popular themes in my writing.

Christmas and love. How fitting, I thought, that those two should appear together and be foremost in my thoughts regularly, but particularly on this morning just days after the holiday had ended. We make Christmas about so many other things. I reflected on what I had been busy with in the preceding thirty days, a list that included the words cookies, parties, presents, decorations, shopping, money, time, and traditions...entries that seemed empty and lifeless without the love that wound through them, binding them all into one glorious whole of treasured time spent with family and friends.

Days later we were giving a friend a ride to church after having not seen him in a couple of weeks. When asked how his Christmas was, his soft-spoken reply was at first difficult to understand. “It wasn't,” he said. Noting our confused silence, he said, “I don't have family to spend it with anymore. I have one son, but I'm not involved in his life in any way. So I just try to sleep through the holiday.” The short discussion seemed to emphasize the point that Christmas and love were inextricably linked. If he didn't have the latter, the former was meaningless to him as well.

But perhaps we're looking at it from the wrong perspective. Maybe the point is that if we truly understand the meaning of Christmas, we will always have love, whether we have friends and family around to celebrate with or not. Christmas is a celebration of the fact that God loved us so much that he refused to leave us to live apart from Him any longer and so sent His Son to pay for our sin in our place. Suddenly we have the incredible love of a heavenly Father to celebrate, and our joy overflows into words like cookies and parties and gifts, when earlier they were just the empty trappings of a hollow holiday without the birth of Christ to give them meaning and life.

It seems odd to still be writing about Christmas when we're now past New Year's and making a sizable dent into January. But somehow that, too, is fitting, because the birth of Christ in a heart and life isn't solely a December event. It can happen on any day of the year when some lost and lonely soul opens the door of their heart to the Love that is longing to come in. The “Christmas in July” (or May or September) slogan suddenly has a whole new meaning! Let the celebrations begin!

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

(John 3:16 KJV)