Penna Dexter

Believing saint, are you ready for Christmas? Maybe I’m being a “Martha,” but I’ve gotta be honest: Christmas is hard work. If you’re the planner of Christmas in your home, you know what I mean. Every year, in early December, my stress level spikes and I secretly wonder if I couldn’t just go into Mary mode this year and forget the Martha stuff. Wouldn’t it please God — that I would just sit at the feet of Christ and worship and meditate on “Immanuel, God With Us?” It’s not that everyone in a family doesn’t do a lot to prepare for Christmas. They do. But, let’s face it, moms, and grandmothers, are usually the best at making the celebration go smoothly in their corners of the world. Sprucing up, decorating the house, planning times to have people in during the holidays, keeping the busy calendar, perhaps scheduling trips to see family, Christmas cards, gifts. The feminists, for the most part, have not succeeded in moving those responsibilities over to men. Most of us like these things, but taken together and added to the rest of life, you wonder how you’ll make to the 26th of December. This year, we were just getting over a pretty exhausting election when I realized it was nearly advent. Time to focus on Christ — and that’s great. But there’s also shopping — and decorating. Yikes! Asking God for enthusiasm, I was kind of wondering if all this celebrating is really a big deal to Him. It is. One year during advent, God validated this for me in the form of a sermon delivered by a wonderful pastor, Dr. Mike Rasmussen. He spoke on “How to Get the Most Out of a Holiday.” Dr. Rasmussen encouraged us to have what he calls “a festival state of mind.” He said, “God likes parties to celebrate His purposes.” It’s the responsibility, he said of the believing adults in the household to pull off an atmosphere of “mirth with a message.” To do that, for those few days around Christmas, we should try to “wall off” the workaday world. Not to be insular though. In fact he said: Go outside your own family. Reach out to people who are left out. It’s biblical to have special food at our festivals — woven into our traditions. I messed up one year when I declined to bake my normal Christmas cookies because some were on a diet. Dr. Rasmussen suggested forgetting the diet at Christmas. My husband has already begun doing that. Mike Rasmussen’s message was rich in the history of Jewish festivals, some of which had once been pagan, but were Christianized. At Christmas, he said, we’re to tell the story of Christ’s birth to our children and grandchildren and to guests and outsiders — and to rejoice. It’s good and right and glorifies God when we create a wonderful and beautiful atmosphere in which to do that.