Christmas Eve Thoughts

I love Christmas. I love the decorations, the lights on the tree and up and down every street. I love the feeling in the air and the cooking and last minute rushing around. Yep, it's my favourite time of the year. But this year I have had a realisation that I am unsure about.

Christmas is full of pretence. From the moment we understand anything at all about Christmas, our parents pretend there is a fat man who somehow gets around the world in one night and manages to enter and exit our homes via a chimney which we may or may not even have!

When we are a little bit older we learn to pretend we love every single thing we unwrap, "It's exactly what I always wanted." We learn to pretend when Uncle Micheal makes a joke, it's funny; we learn that we must pretend we enjoy hearing "My, how you've grown!" twenty times from twenty separate relatives we don't even really remember and who all enjoy stating the bleeding obvious.

We pretend that it's okay to have five extra house-guests turn up on Christmas Eve. We pretend it's okay that our favourite wine glass gets broken and we pretend...maybe not too successfully...that the red wine stain on our carpet will come out with a professional clean. The world over, people are pretending for the Christmas season. And I wonder if that's a bad thing.

We do it, essentially, to avoid hurting people's feelings and keeping the peace. We don't want to be the ones who ruined Christmas...so we grit our teeth and pretend all is going well.

The Way I See It....I wonder why we don't do it all year round? The thing with pretending is this: the longer you do it, the more it becomes your reality. Maybe if we pretended more often to appreciate family and enjoy being with them, we would soon find we don't need to pretend any more. If we pretended more often not to care about our material possessions, like wine glasses and carpet, we might find our priorities changing so we can better see the Big Picture of our existence.

We just might find that our pretence turns into honesty and surely that can only be beneficial to us, our families and our communities. Then maybe we can take leaf out of the book of a certain baby born over 2000 years ago. And this particular baby was pretending to be nothing other than who He was. May you enjoy this Christmas, and future Christmases, in a new light and perspective.