Anticipation

December 24. Christmas Eve Day – the day when all anticipation of Christmas culminates and eager expectation fills the air as each family member looks forward to the gifts to come, the traditions to follow, and the celebrations to have the following day. While December 25 is *THE SPECIAL DAY*, I am coming to the conclusion that, actually, Christmas Eve day is my favorite day of the year. I’m a fanatic for anticipation. A lot of times, I realize that looking forward to an event is often more exciting than the event itself. This is not to say that Christmas day “lets me down,” but just the opposite - that it is always so good, that it raises my anticipation for the following year.

But besides anticipation, my favorite part about Christmas (or, perhaps the thing I anticipate most about the season) is our family traditions and the quirks that come with them:
*Decorating the Christmas tree (and wondering every year what-in-the-world happened to the ornament hooks)
*Drinking egg nog (and going back for seconds after the brothers have gone to bed!)
*Eating red and green M&M’s with the cousins (there can’t be any other colors involved. Just red and green. And, eventually, someone at some time will sort out the red from the green, just so someone else can come along and mix them up again.)
*Putting Christmas lights on the house (and figuring out how to out-do the way we did it the year before)
*Decorating sugar cookies (from mom’s secret recipe that will definitely get passed down to me [right, mom?])
*Walking through the Alta Loma Christmas lights (and drinking hot cocoa that inevitably burns my tongue every year)
*Watching White Christmas with the family (this must be watched as close to Christmas as possible, not at the beginning of December and certainly not after Christmas)
*The dollar gift game (a classic family game where we play to win cheap gifts that nobody really wants, but everybody lovingly fights over anyways)
*Exchanging gifts (with mom’s side of the family on the 23rd and dad’s side of the family on the 24th… this is a must)
*Lasagna on Christmas Eve. Quiche on Christmas morning. (If we ever change this up, I think I might cry)
*Opening stockings (there’s just something really special about digging your hand further and further to find treasures at the bottom of an over-sized sock)
*Opening presents Christmas morning (My brothers and I make an agreement every year that we won’t even peek in the living room until we wake each other up… which must be at an agreeable hour)

So maybe some of these things imply burnt tongues and silly rules. But Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas if we didn’t follow these traditions.

And yet… I sometimes think that maybe we place too much emphasis on our traditions. We go to great lengths to celebrate Christmas, but then get so focused on following the traditions and keeping up with the decorations that we forget why we’re celebrating in the first place.

Really, all these silly rules and burnt tongues and sorted M&M’s are just a part of our celebration of the day that God offered to mankind the greatest gift He could ever give – a Savior! We were “dead in our trespasses and sins,” (Ephesians 2:1) but on Christmas day, we remember that God sent His Son, Jesus, to release us from that sin and to offer us forgiveness that we might live in eternity with Him!

As exciting as anticipation and following traditions can be, there is nothing more exciting than the good news that God has sent a Savior for us – He has been born!

Merry Christmas!