By Debora Coty
Is your house beginning to look a lot like this?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the everyday blessings we enjoy: health, family, home, old friends, new friends, Cadbury milk chocolate bars with almonds …
You know, I’d just like to saver this lovely tranquility – this peaceful contentment, this quiet pre-Christmas-madness moment – a little longer. Before the stress begins. Ahhh.
Okay. It’s over. Here comes the little mister lugging the first side-splitting box of decorations from the attic.
Sigh.
But it doesn’t have to be. Over. Right?
Can’t you just picture a gurgling Baby Jesus smiling up at you from the manger? He doesn’t care if the halls are decked or the Christmas tree is blazing. He doesn’t give a fig about figgy pudding (what IS that stuff, anyway?) or gingerbread cookies or pumpkin pies.
He doesn’t even plan to shop for one single gift.
All Baby Jesus wants for Christmas is you. Your attention. Your adoration. Your unfettered joy at the miracle of His birth.
Let’s face it, dear friend, it’s pretty much impossible to give Baby Jesus His heart’s desire the way we currently do Christmas … putting up more decorations than the Griswolds, baking so many cookies that elves move into your backyard tree, shopping till ya drop then dragging back to the packed mall the next day for the ten items you forgot.
But what if we just stop … breathe … gaze down into that manger … and remember why we’re doing all this in the first place?
So how about you and I make a pact right now to do it differently this year? Let’s keep that wee baby in the manger at the center of our consciousness every blessed day.
Because we truly are Blessed. Why, you might even say we’re too blessed to be stressed!
