(Excerpt from the book Kindred Travelers, by Kevin Murray)
I remember when I was a young child how Christmas was to me—the sights, the sounds, the scents, the tastes, and mostly how it felt….magical. I thought Santa Claus to be the most awe-inspiring fellow there was. He swooped in on a reindeer-pulled sleigh wearing a puffy red coat (that must have been toasty as cinders in the warm Miami winters) and gave me super enthralling stuff like model airplanes, electronic football, and toy race tracks, all of which broke in the first week. I don’t blame Santa. I blame the whims of the elements. And possibly I was a little rough on my toys.
I found out the embarrassing way (in front of my peers who apparently were miles ahead of me) that Santa was not r-…Well, I won’t spoil it here for those who don’t know. And it took a while to calm down (some six to eight years as I recall) to a sensible acceptance that Christmas was no longer going to be an extravagance of gifts from a red-coated jolly man in exchange for my being, on balance, nice; but a celebration instead to share laughs, consume foodstuffs, and open my presents, from then on consisting of more clothes than toys. By the time I was twenty, I had reached the point where giving gifts, not just receiving, was okay by me too. So I was improving. But still I had the wrong idea.
It was my first Christmas as a Christian man that I recognized a categorical difference from all the other Christmases I’d experienced before. I came to apprehend what the holiday to celebrate the birth of Christ was supposed to feel like all along; not magical, but miraculous—which is a greater feat by far—a love-led rescue mission for the salvation of my soul.
Once, I would have told you, you’d be a fool to trade the excitement of a Santa-centric Christmas for anything else, for the plain-speaking reason of…I didn’t know what I was talking about. Now I do. In the tough, necessary passages of life-is-not-all-as-it-should-be (otherwise known as growing up), I came to a new beginning by a leap of saving faith that had the desirable upshot of my being saved for God, to Heaven, in Christ, whereupon my Christmas worldview metamorphosed from the wrong one into the right one: Jesus is the gift. Christmas is Jesus born into this world to remove the curse of death (2 Timothy 1:10) so we can have eternal relationship with our heavenly Father and with earthly each other the way it was originally meant to be. What else is Christmas if not that? Who else is Christ?
I hope this encourages you to celebrate the Christ in Christmas today.
Kevin Murray
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