Holiday Rant

It started yesterday with my desire for a Christmas tree. We haven't had one for the last 4 years for one reason or another. I got irritated that I don't have the energy to 1) Keep a tree alive in our home 2) Buy one, put it up and eventually take it down. I started feeling resentful that we live with such little margin. We don't even have the means to celebrate Christmas! After getting the girls down Jared and I collapsed on the sofa to eat our Pizza My Heart (because we don't have energy to cook or clean up) and watch amazing race. We were both taken by every commercial revolving around the holiday spending season. That sure cured my desire for a Christmas tree fast. As I drove Claire to school this morning we discussed the thankfulness gifts that we are distributing to her entourage this week. Maybe it's just because gifts is my love language, but to me, it makes so much more sense to give gifts at Thanksgiving than Christmas. Christmas is the celebration of the birth Jesus and his gift of salvation to the world, it's about Christ. Not families or eating together or trees with lights. Which leads me to my next tangent, the White House holiday tree. Get over it people! Putting lights on a tree has to do with the celebrating of Christ how? I think it has a lot more to do with the material and commercialism of the holiday spending season. I think that calling it a holiday tree seems more appropriate that it being another symbol that devalues the true meaning of Christmas. So back to Thanksgiving. Shouldn't this be the biggest holiday of them all. As Americans we have running water, hospitals that are sanitary and do a pretty good job of not killing people, we can drive our cars to Starbucks and get a latte without even thinking about the back breaking work of the poor people on the other side of the world who picked the beans for us. As Christians we can rejoice that every day of the year God is intimately involved in the details of our life and that He loves us and forgives us despite our sinful nature. I have so much to be thankful for, I don't know that I am going to be able to squeeze it all in this week. My hope is that I won't and that I will have a spirit of thanksgiving all year, but I am a work in progress. I look forward to getting our Hanukkah menorah out and celebrating God's fulfilled promises. I look forward to eating lots of peppermint flavored treats and looking at lights because its winter and it gets cold and dark early. I look forward to our advent calender and birthday cake for Jesus. I like winter time because it has a lot of good celebrations and because the cooler weather brings us to do fun things that make us feel all warm inside. I don't buy into the "Jesus is the reason for the season" bit. Jesus is the reason for each day, every month all year long. Shouldn't we love on everyone like Jesus would want us to all the time and not just in December. Well there it is. You can tell I am feeling a bit feisty this morning, which is good, because I have been numb for far too long and it is good to be back.