Twas The Weekend Before Christmas

Twas the weekend before Christmas, and all the through the house,

There's a mother much stirring, perhaps a bit like a mouse. 

She's tearing and cutting and taping galore.

She's hidden away in a room with locked door.

Yes, this is gift wrapping weekend! And I bet so many of you are doing exactly the same. I don’t have many visions of dancing sugar plums in my head, but I always envision this wrapping task being finished much earlier in December. However, here I am in my kerchief and still wrapping gifts. The guy in his cap? Well, he doesn’t enter the wrapping scene so much. He does, however, get the credit for buying most of the gifts. So it all works out pretty swell for me. We have our lanes and we stay in them.

Gifts for Sally and Samuel and Meg and my mom.

Another for Karen and Kallie and Tom!

So wrap-away! wrap-away! wrap-away all!

Unless you were smart and had it wrapped at the mall.

I know for some it can be a mad dash. Mayhem. A crazy Christmas scramble. I remember those days waiting for the kids to be in bed so we could get it all done. I’ll never forget those late hours on Christmas Eve when we’d finally have a chance to pull out all the presents and arrange them around our tree. The excitement and expectation of it was ours on that night before Christmas. The children may have been asleep with their own holiday dreams, but Rick and I were the midnight elves reveling in our creation of the Christmas morning magic. It was both exhausting and exhilarating. 

We’d finally crash into bed for a few hours of sleep — there was absolutely no long winter’s nap at that point in life—and we’d wait to hear the pitter patter of tiny feet and the clamor of excited kids pulling us from our bed because Santa had come!

It’s quite different now. 

With grown children and no Santa believers in the house at the moment, we wrap gifts and place them under the tree at a more leisurely pace. And yet here I am the weekend before Christmas and still wrapping. Everyone will be home this year and even though we limit our buying, it continues to add up to a lot of scotch tape and bows.

But I love it so much. I love picking the papers and the real ribbon. I love creating the color scheme and making it all pretty. I know everyone has their own plan for this. And there is absolutely no right or wrong way. I realize my color coordination might be a considered a bit weird by others. Yes, it’s the gift inside which matters most, but the wrapping itself, I’ll admit, it brings me joy. It’s how I am wired. It fills my creative cup. 

When we moved to the South a couple of decades ago, I found out that some people down here don’t even wrap their gifts. It’s part of the Santa gig. He just brings them and there they appear come Christmas morning. Talk about magic! I’ve never been so sure about that particular practice, but I did question why it was all of us northerners were adding this extra wrapping step. The South hasn't gotten everything right, but maybe they were on to something with this whole no-wrapping thing.  And, I suppose that’s a whole other blog post.

But for me, the wrapping is part of the expectation. Because is it not that expectation of a gift that we all love? What is this? What could it be? What does it mean? What will it reveal? Is it really for me?

We might not all be Santa believers, but we are most certainly anticipators. All of us. I'm sure it is woven into our basic DNA. We eagerly wait and wonder and expect and hope. And that is what these gifts under our trees show us about ourselves: regardless of age or anything else, we love to anticipate.

Perhaps God created us this way so we might someday understand the expectation of a babe born in Bethlehem. A baby also carefully wrapped. A baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. A God come down and wrapped in flesh. The most beautiful present our world has ever received. The best news ever gotten. Our greatest hope lying in a manger. The weary world rejoices. This is the most amazing Christmas morning, but so much better. This is the expectation and the unveiling all rolled into one perfect present. 

This is the tired parents listening for the pitter patter of tiny feet and the cries of “Santa’s come!” This is the mad dash to the family room and the tearing into the terrific piles and the exclamations and shouts of joy. Dreams come true. And wishes exceeded. Times a million. And then, even then,  way better than that.

Because the baby come to earth wrapped in swaddling clothes isn’t just for a short moment on Christmas morning. It is forever. It is for always. It is for eternity. It is for everyone. 

It is the answer to that gaping hole of expectation in each one of us that no earthly thing—no matter how grand or great or beautifully wrapped or longingly wished for—can ever fill. 

It is the simple gift of a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. A baby come for the sole purpose of wrapping us up in His great and never-ending love. 

Oh come, oh come Emmanuel.

Come to save the weary world. 

Come to be our heavenly hope.

“Come that we might have life, and have it abundantly.”  ~ John 10:10

This Christmas as you gaze at the gifts around your tree, take a moment to remind yourself of the most perfectly wrapped present —  Emmanuel.

“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” James 1:17

This post may be over, but the mother's still wrapping.

The children and husband on her door they are tapping.

"Mom, we picked up some pizzas for dinner, alright?"

"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"