In Search of Christmas

Do you ever need to "feel" Christmas? I am not talking about the excitement of giving and receiving gifts and other Christmas traditions, I am talking about the real feeling of Christmas.

I am probably not making any sense to you, after all I am not making any sense to me. I remember as a boy having that feeling. I can't explain it to you if you have never had it before. I find that as I grow older, that the feeling is harder and harder to find. I do not know if life has caused that feeling to be dulled or if the marketing of our modern times has dulled it, or if just age itself has caused the fire to burn down.

I told my wife the other night that I would really like to find some small little church or community putting on an old fashioned Christmas pageant. I thought that maybe there I could spark that "feeling" of Christmas and relive for a moment what is so hard to hold on to. So we kept our eyes open for something that might fit our hectic schedule and what do you know, a small community right down the road about ten miles was putting on a living Bethlehem promotion as a community event. I thought that surely I could find that "feeling" in this atmosphere so we tentatively penciled in this date and went about our daily lives.

Late that afternoon we were frantically working on Christmas projects that we were growing short on time with when my wife's phone rang. It was her mother and father and they were coming through town and wanted to meet us for supper so we said sure because we truly love being around them and we enjoy their company. My wife and I knew that this would put us short on time on the Living Bethlehem, but we thought that it would all work out. Well, supper ran longer than expected, the visit was nice but we were really cutting it close now. So we swung by to gather up our grandson and off we went to find that "feeling" of Christmas. Needless to say, as we arrived in the little community expecting to see a large group gathered somewhere and cars everywhere our first pass through town yielded just a small sleepy little town. Disappointed we turned around and hit a few side streets until we finally found it. The wise men and the shepherds were all gone as were the host of singing angels and all that was left was the empty stage where everything had been. People were gathering up and loading stuff into their cars. We had missed it all.

I feel like that is how it has been for me for a while. Christmas has been elusive to me. I do not know nor do I understand what sparks that feeling that I have spoken of, but I hope that you have found it this year. As for me, personally I am still in search of Christmas.