So...Christmas, Eh?

So I’m standing here at work, amidst the insipid clatter and clang of machinery, conveyors and saw blades, on the 23^rd of December, realizing that I’ve given little thought to Christmas, true Christmas to be exact, not the manufactured, Hallmark-cliché of rampant materialism that we sold from Thanksgiving onward. I’m talking about Christ’s Mass, the celebration and worship of the birth of Emmanual. Somehow I’ve missed Advent, spending negligible amounts of time preparing my heart to celebrate the Christ child. Part of the fault—okay, most of the fault—lay in my own laziness concerning my soul. For whatever reason I just seem to have a blasé attitude toward Christmas this year. It just snuck up on me, and I never really prepared myself for it. This is troubling. I like Christmas. I like to think about Christmas and anticipate it. I like to think about Christmas and Advent and their relationship to the 2^nd Coming. Somehow I missed it all. I wonder what Christmas Eve will be like for me in my unprepared state…

There are few events in history more engorged with significance than the Incarnation, every aspect of it bleeding the miraculous and declaring the culmination of God’s plan for humanity—He would take on flesh. And I stand here in my factory having given little thought to this grand event. How has it come to this? How have I slipped so far as to miss entirely the celebration of God-with-man?

But all is not lost. On Christmas morning my wife, 5-year-old son, and I will be serving Christmas breakfast in the community where my brother works. Perhaps the greatest way to celebrate the Word-made-flesh is to become Christ in the flesh for our fellow man.

Merry Christmas