This year, I'm so ready for the joy of the Christmas season all around. The neighbors putting up Christmas lights. The girls baking Christmas cookies. The gas station playing Christmas music. The Advent candles decorating our dinner table. The annual traditions of Peanutcracker, gingerbread house making, Christmas caroling at the nursing home, putting ornaments on the tree, White elephant gift exchanges, and figuring out the logistics of travel on Christmas day. These things are all fairly small in and of themselves, but they only happen this time of year, and collectively they remind us that this time of year is special. It's special because you get extra time with family and friends, you are encouraged to embrace generosity and goodwill, and you get to bask in joy in a way that seems neither appropriate nor true the rest of the year.
And I think the reason joy seems so appropriate and true this time of year is best expressed in this verse from "Joy to the World" --
It expresses that, one day, we won't have to be dealing with the complexity of good and bad all mixed together. We won't have to look to Peppermint Mochas and "All I Want for Christmas is You" to take the sting out of the deep grief and hardship that life can bring and the holidays can be reminders of. The world is hard because of the curse, but there is hope for life beyond sins and sorrows and thorns, and this all starts with the Incarnation. Someday there will be no more hard. This is the deepest, truest reason for wild, unrestrained, unimaginable joy. And that is ESPECIALLY joyful for any of us in the thick of the thorns right now, imagining the day when those thorns are gone, completely and forever.
This year, I'm so ready for, so needful of, the deep joy that comes with the Incarnation and all the promises being fulfilled. Merry Christmas to you and yours! And for those who have gone through hardship this year, I hope you experience joy mixed in with the hard this Christmas season.
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