Is Jesus enough for Christmas?

I’VE ALREADY OPENED MY GIFTS. I did it on Sunday.

I know. It’s way too early. I’ve never done this before. But my family had little choice this year.

Here’s the problem. My daughter is nine months into a baby bump. It looks like more.

The boy child has an arrival date of Christmas. But nobody and his brother believes that.

Neither my pregnant daughter nor my son, whose wife is carrying a little girl expected around Eastertime, thought it was a good idea to wait for our traditional Christmas Eve gift exchange. Everyone seemed to agree that my daughter would be otherwise occupied.

So we enjoyed our Christmas family meal: beef roast, mashed potatoes, a veggie tray, corn, and peanut butter cookies…with other cookies tasty but not as important to me.

Then we opened our gifts. For my big gift, my wife gave me a stack of 3×5 cards…each card with a clue about how to get to where the gift was being stored. Thirty-two cards. And I had to figure out how to put them in the right order.

“This is not the meaning of Christmas,” I said.

• Open garage door. Get in vehicle.
• Turn vehicle on; back/drive out the driveway.
• Turn right at end of cul-de-sac.

Imagine 32 of those. I didn’t have to imagine.

I hate puzzles. So I flipped through the deck and looked for something familiar.

• Drive past an elementary school on the right. You are almost there!

“It’s at Bec’s house.”

She’s our daughter.

No one denied it. And in time I convinced them to tell me what the gift was: a table saw, like the one Joseph must have had.

So here I sit today wondering about Christmas.

This will be the first Christmas in my lifetime that I won’t have any packages to open, toys to play with, or well-intended gifts to return.

This Christmas I’m wondering if Jesus will be enough to carry the day.

Let me get back to you.

For more about Christmas

• video of a Christmas Song: Winter Snow
• Ghosts of Christmas past
• Christians, chill out about Christmas
• The Christmas Story…a fresh look

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