Maybe It IS the Most Wonderful Time of Year...

Someone needs to check my temperature.

I think I'm actually okay with the holidays approaching.

(Come to think of it, I have had a nasty cold lately - do sinus infections often result in personality changes?)

Maybe it's the fact that I made four delicious pies for Thanksgiving, without breaking much of a sweat. (Granted, those pies are incredibly easy to make. Who knew? All this time, I thought Mom was slaving away.... but now I know the secret, and it has a lot to do with refrigerated pie dough and Eagle Brand.... But this'll be our little secret, too, right? We want everyone else to continue to be super impressed.)

Maybe it's that I've ordered our Christmas cards already. (It helped that our photo session was in April. Bluebonnets and snowflakes are a perfect match, no?)

Maybe it's that I'm just really looking forward to justifying countless hours of extra TV time with the excuse that classic Christmas movies need to be watched. Truth? Truth.

Maybe it's Amazon Prime. Oh, how I love thee, Amazon Prime.

Maybe it's that my kids spent the entire summer being forced to pick up their toys, and I'm pretty sure that for the first time, they basically get it when I say, "You don't really need any more stuff." Sure, sure, they'll still get more stuff - but it helps that for the first time ever, they are not working out of a place of (mis)perceived poverty.

Maybe it's that the kids are old enough now to decorate the tree entirely on their own. Because really, is that a task that any grown-up really enjoys? (Okay, okay, maybe I am still a bit of a Scrooge at heart...)

It's definitely got something to do with an early Thanksgiving. Y'all. It's still November!! For the first time in a decade, I don't feel like the calendar rushed on without me! It's the week-long equivalent of the end of Daylight Savings Time. Free. Time. I plan on wasting every second of it, you can be sure of that.

But probably, just maybe and perhaps, I'm in a better mood about Christmas this year because of something else. Several weeks ago, a friend and minister at church asked if I'd be interested in helping him write some daily meditations on the Nativity. He had envisioned a month-long, multi-sensory study of the birth of Christ that might be of some encouragement to the families of our congregation as they head into the holidays. Since then, we've both been writing and writing (24 posts is a LOT of writing for those of us who regularly blog only bimonthly...), and eating and sleeping and breathing the birth of Christ.

It's hard not to be excited, when that's the focus of the season.

Up until now, I always thought it was the focus of the season for us - I mean, how many corny rhymes do we need to remind us of that? Christ in Christmas, Reason for the Season, Greatest Gift of All..... But, as it turns out, no magical mantra is really enough to ensure that our focus is truly on Christ - unless our focus is truly on Christ.

In the past, I'd spend so much time and energy Pinterest-ing ways to lead my kids to think about Christ during Christmas - that by December 24th, I was just done. I did not want to see another shepherd or wise man for another 364 days, thankyouverymuch. But this is what I was missing - before I try to lead my kids to think about Christ, I need to be doing it myself! Ha! I mean, it's not rocket science....

Anyway, it's been a great blessing to do this. And I'm learning a lot, too - not the least of which is how ill-equipped I am for this task. But I know that I join the ranks of a lot of ill-equipped servants of the Lord, and I'm praying He'll take my broken vessel and shine brightly through the many cracks. If you're interested in following along, we'll start posting on December 2. You can find us at oholynight.org.

Until then, I'm going to go take some Sudafed and sit on the couch with Andrew and watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer until our eyeballs fall out. Merry Christmas!