Christmas Retrospective

I rethought the whole topic of Advent and Christmas last year. I've bored many of you, I'm sure, with posts about this.{vbg} We changed things somewhat, resulting in several shifts in emphasis for our family. I am really pleased with the changes and plan to develop them more next year.

For my own benefit, and for anyone else who might be interested, here are some summarized notes which distill what I've learned this year.

~Advent is NOT, and never has been, a Countdown To Christmas. The huge growth in sales of 'advent calendars' in the last few decades has somehow convinced us that it is. It is not. Advent has its own unique part in the rhythm of the year. Its role is NOT to prepare us for Christmas, but to prepare us for the Second Coming.

~Advent Sundays can play a special role in keeping our family on track spiritually. We can and should plan for special Jesus-focused events on those Sundays.

~Christmas does not start in November. Sure, excitement starts to build after Bonfire Night on November 5th, because that's the next big celebration for us here in Britain. But there's a difference between anticipation and actual celebration.

~A long period of celebration is simply a secular response to commercial pressure. Anticipation of a sustained period of 12 days beginning on Christmas Eve of meaningful family time is better than 8 weeks or more of diluted Christmas ending on Christmas Day, quickly followed by anti-climax.

~Christmas starts on Christmas Eve, not matter what the advertisers or the high street stores tell us.{g}

~The tradition of keeping Christmas for 12 days right across the top of the year is a good one! Our forefathers knew what they were doing! It works! There is a rightness and truthfullness about it which I simply did not expect. LOL!

~Now that we've had children in this family for 18 years, we need to encourage their thoughts about Christmas traditions in future. As a family of adults, our feelings about Christmas are evolving, quite naturally, and all of us need to be involved in the changes we make.

~Jesus was very much present at the heart of our Christmas. Next year, the challenge, for us as a family, will be to make sure that others, for whom Jesus is merely a myth about a baby, can share that with us more. In our home. With us.

~We need to spread the cost of Christmas better across the year. We need to spread the time of preparations better across the year. I need to shake off this idea of the pre-Christmas period being busy and stressful, but planning to ensure it is not.

~We were sad to put away the Christmas Decorations on the 12th Day. But that is so much better than being so heartily sick of them, because they've been up for so long, that we want to tear them down on Boxing Day!

~I feel satisfied. It was a good Christmas. So often, after Christmas, I have a sense of incompleteness, of regret, of disappointment and anti-climax. There have been many reasons for that in the past, but this year, I only feel content. Like a baby who has had a good feed and falls blissfully asleep in its mother's arms. Mmmmm...who'd have thought? LOL!