On the Dilemma of Christmas Greetings

It can be hard to know how to best greet people at Christmas time. As reported in this post and this one too, I love December because our family's Christmas traditions help us worship Christ and translate that worship into service to other people. That fills us with joy and helps us to remember how to really live. It is great! It's fabulous. So, when I see people, I want to share the joy and inner peace I'm experiencing by saying, "Merry Christmas!"

At the same time, I've sometimes worried about someone feeling excluded who does not celebrate Christmas. I don't want to say, "Happy Holidays" because it seems to water down what I'm experiencing in December but I also want to show respect to people who choose to believe and celebrate differently than I do. I see that kind of respect for other people as its own sort of sacred thing.

At church a week ago, my good friend shared a story that helped me resolve this quandary. He said that he was with some Jewish friends of his and told them, "Happy Hannukkah." They stopped him sand said, "You're Christian. You shouldn't be saying, 'Happy Hannukah.' You should say, 'Merry Christmas.' You say 'Merry Christmas' to us and we'll say 'Happy Hannukah' to you and then we can all respond with 'Thank you.'"

I love this way of seeing it! I want to be true to the deep feelings I have about celebrating Christ's birth but I also want other people to feel like they can express their deep feelings about whatever they celebrate. So, I'm going to do things the way my friend's Jewish friends suggested. I'm going to say, "Merry Christmas" to people and be happy when people express holiday greetings to me in whatever way they desire. And I'll say "Thank you" to people when they give me whatever greeting they choose to give.

And, so, in that vein, here is a video Christmas card from my family (with an update on how we're doing in the description below):

Christmas Update

At the beginning of December, I posted this post on our family Christmas traditions. I said I’d be posting more posts about how our traditions are going but honestly have not made time for it because I’ve been enjoying Christmas time so much! This one will probably be the only one I do before Christmas.

Our daily Christmas Devotionals have brought the Christmas spirit into our home and family more quickly and more powerfully than any year before! Every time someone asks me how I'm doing, I enthusiastically say I'm doing great and that I love this time of year. I find myself telling everyone how awesome our Christmas Devotionals are! I hope I don't come off as bragging—I just want to share it because it's making us so happy. It has been so wonderful to sing worshipful Christmas hymns each day and read scriptures together each day and set goals to serve people each day! I’ve learned that singing sacred music before reading scriptures really helps us kids get into scripture study more.

Also, our Church is doing this amazing Advent social media campaign called #LightTheWorld. It complements our Christmas Devotionals so well because each day there is a video that highlights something Christ did and how we can do it too in our own way! We’ve added these 30 second videos to our daily devotionals and have used the theme of each one to inform the gift we give the Savior that day.

The greatest blessing that has come of this is watching our kids get excited about doing good things. When the daily theme was “Heal the Sick”, one of our children chose to take all of the money in his little bank and give it to Primary Children’s hospital. When the theme was “Clothe the Naked”, one of them went and got some clothes and wanted to give them to people who don’t have clothes. One child likes to hold the baby Jesus from the nativity while we sing the daily Christmas hymn and always says, “I help Jesus” when we ask what gift we’ll give to the Savior each day. Seeing them do these things is such a blessing because they are doing them of their own accord.

Through all of this, I am reflecting a lot on Ebenezer Scrooge and how Dickens said that he learned to keep Christmas all year long. I wonder if there are aspects of our Christmas Devotionals that we should do even after Christmas is over. I don’t want them to become cliché or too normal for our kids so I think we’ll definitely have some aspects of the devotionals that are unique to December but maybe we can sing before scripture study all year long and maybe we can set and report on goals with scripture study somehow the rest of the year.

How have your Christmas traditions gone this year? What do you think it means to keep Christmas all year long?

Christmas Traditions

The Christmas season is such a magical time. There is something special in the air that makes me feel wonderful. But, of course, it isn’t special just because the calendar says December. There isn’t some arbitrary special feeling that comes upon people once a year because of the earth’s position in relation to the sun. It’s special because of how we as individuals, families, and a society act and think differently at this time of year.

That said, during our first three years of marriage, Jamie and I had to fight each year to “feel the Christmas magic”. It would get to be halfway into December and we’d realize that we felt terribly normal. We yearned to feel that special something during Christmas. Each year, we’d pray for help to feel the Christmas spirit and then we’d be lead to serve someone in need and worship Christ in some special way and then that special Christmas feeling would come.

After a few years of this, we learned our lesson and decided it was time to institutionalize some family Christmas traditions focused on service and on Christ. We began what we call our “Christmas Devotionals”. We made 30+ tree ornaments that each have a Christmas hymn on them as well as a scripture. The scriptures are segments of the Christmas story in the New Testament or prophesies from the Old Testament or Book of Mormon about Christ (you can read the list of scriptures and hymns we use here). We also bought an inexpensive notebook we use as a Christmas diary.

Each year, soon after Thanksgiving, we decorate our home for Christmas. We put up the Christmas tree but intentionally leave it just a little sparse with ornaments. Then, each evening until Christmas, one of the kids picks one of the special ornaments we made. We sing the Christmas hymn on it and read the scripture. Then, we get out the Christmas diary and each write down one thing we’ll do the next day to give a gift to the Savior. The gift is often in the form of helping others in some way. The next night, as we do the devotional, we talk about how it went giving those gifts and write down new ones.

We’ve learned from experience that the actions we do to give gifts to Jesus is the key to the whole thing bringing the Christmas spirit. One year, we decided to just do the hymn and scripture and skip writing down the gift. We wanted to speed up the process to accommodate small children. But we found that, without the commitment to action, we didn’t feel the magic of the season like we wanted. To go from hollow to holy, we had to not only sing and read scripture but also give of ourselves.

Other traditions have also helped us focus on Christ at this time of year. For example, we try to involve our chidren each year in giving gifts to a family in need. Jamie and I have a tradition of saying we’ll read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol each year. We have a tradition of not doing so each year—but this year will be different….

Personal traditions are great too! I like to dedicate my December personal scripture study to reading one of the New Testament Gospels or the “Fifth Gospel” in the Book of Mormon (which tells the story of Christ’s post-resurrection visit to the Americas). I rotate through one Gospel each year. I enjoy reflecting on Christ’s life, example, and sacrifice each December to remind me why His birth matters so much. Now that I’m blogging more, I’ve decided to try out a new tradition. For the month of December, I’ve revamped my blog to add some Christmas cheer and I’ll be posting short reports on special experiences we have as we go about our Christmas traditions.

Of course, it’s good to have Christmas traditions that are just fun too! We like to give gifts of course. We watch Home Alone together each year along with the Doctor Who Christmas Special. Every year, I like to welcome in the season by posting the funny parody video on Facebook. Fun and joy and laughter are part of the magic of Christmas along with service and Christ. But we’ve found that putting Christ (which includes serving Him and His children) at the heart of our festivities animates and quickens all the other pleasantries of the season.*

I hope this blog post will start a helpful thread of sharing tradition ideas with one another. So, please comment: what Christmas or Holiday traditions do you have? How do they help you feel the magic of the season?

*This makes me think of a prophetic quote given in a 1988 Christmas address, “...men and women who turn their lives over to God will discover that He can make a lot more out of their lives than they can. He will deepen their joys, expand their vision, quicken their minds, strengthen their muscles, lift their spirits, multiply their blessings, increase their opportunities, comfort their souls, raise up friends, and pour out peace. Whoever will lose his life in the service of God will find eternal life” (Ezra Taft Benson, “Gifts and Expectations”, Ensign, December 1988). I highly recommend reading the entire article.