“What is your favourite Christmas tradition?”
It doesn’t happen often, but that question left me without a response.
In the years that our kids were children, we had many Christmas traditions.
The cookies left out for Santa. The Christmas dresses for the girls, picked out and purchased by their dad. The Sunday School productions and school concerts. Driving through neighbourhoods to see the light displays. Going to the tree farm to pick out the best tree ever. The box of used books for the kids to spend Christmas Eve day reading (after having cleaned their bedrooms). Plus so many more!
As I sat at the women’s event, trying to come up with a tradition that has grown up with us, that could be well communicated to a tableful of strangers, I was instantly, frighteningly without a response.
Traditions are beautiful opportunities to celebrate the permanence and stability within a family, workplace or community. They give us opportunities to have clear, shared expectations, memories and anticipations to come in the future.
Days later I was sitting by the lit Christmas tree, thinking of my three, and the mountains of various heights that they were climbing. I was moved to give them and the current events in their lives, to God in prayer.
How easy it is to be reminded to pray when sitting in front of a lighted Christmas tree. It is as though the lights whisper to my soul.
It makes me think of the name Hagar gave to God,
“So Hagar gave this name (El-roi) to the LORD who had spoken to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “Here I have seen the One who sees me!”” (Genesis 16:13)
The God who sees me …
That is what I experience when I an sitting by the Christmas tree lights … a sense, a reminder that God can see me, for who I am, and I am drawn into his presence as the lights illuminate the room.
And, each Christmas, I sit by the Christmas tree, glowing with lights, and am drawn to bring my loves to Him, to lay them … their burdens at his feet, all the while sensing profoundly that he sees them, that he sees me.
It is not a Christmas tradition, limited to childhood. For it is beyond the cookies and dresses and gifts and carols and all of the Hallmark moments … for it is the gift that can be handed down from generation to generation.
And I pray it is. I pray that our children will know the joy of having seen the One who sees them. That is the tradition that I want to share.
itsawonderfilledlife 