For All That He Has Done, I Choose To Give Him My Love

While helping her mother prepare for Christmas, a little girl asked about the meaning of this holiday.  The mother told her that Christmas was the time of the year we celebrate the birthday of Jesus, God's Son.  The little girl asked her mother why Jesus didn't get the presents if it was his birthday.  The mother explained the tradition of gift exchange as a way of showing love for one another and the matter was dropped at that.

On the evening before Christmas the little girl brought a gift-wrapped package from her room and placed it under the tree.  "What's in the box?" her mother asked.

"A gift for Jesus.  I am leaving it under the tree so he can open it tonight while I am asleep."

The mother did not want her daughter to be disappointed, so during the night she opened the package.  But there was nothing in it.  The next morning her daughter raced into the living room to see if her package had been opened.  It had!  She shouted to her mother, "Jesus opened his present last night!"

The mystified mother walked over to her daughter and asked what she had given Jesus.

The little girl explained, "I figure that Jesus has about everything he needs, and I can't give him much cuz I'm just a little girl.  But there is one thing I can give him.  So I decided to give him a BOX OF LOVE."

- submitted by Fred Lowery, The Pastor's Story File (December 1993)

It's Your Turn To Give

A mother was sick and tired of hearing her children always telling her what they wanted Santa to bring them.  On one such occasion she reminded them that Christmas is a time of giving and not receiving.

The children could tell that Mom really believed what sounded like absolute nonsense to them.  They secretly met and tried to figure out what was going through their mother's head.  They finally came to a conclusion as to what must be done.

They went to their mother in a very concerned manner.  The oldest child acted as the spokesperson: "Mom, we've been thinking about what you told us about how important it is to give at Christmas; with all of our talk about Santa, you must have felt left out.  We don't want you to feel this way, Mom.  So I'll tell you what we have decided to do.  Santa doesn't have to get us all the presents; if you want to get us some, too, we're going to let you!"

- Michael Hodgin, Parables, Etc. (December 1993)

Christmas Peace

Eighty years ago, on the first Christmas Day of World War I, British and German troops put down their guns and celebrated peacefully together in the no-man's land between the trenches.

The war, briefly, came to a halt.

In some places, festivities began when German troops lit candles on Christmas trees on their parapets so the British sentries a few hundred yards away could see them.

Elsewhere, the British acted first, starting bonfires and letting off rockets.

Pvt. Oswald Tilley of the London Rifle Brigade wrote to his parents: "Just you think that while you were eating your turkey, etc., I was out talking and shaking hands with the very men I had been trying to kill a few hours before!  It was astounding."

All along the line that Christmas Day, soldiers found their enemies were much like them and began asking why they should be trying to kill each other.

The generals were shocked.  High Command diaries and statements express anxiety that if that sort of  thing spread it could sap troops' will to fight.

Th soldiers in khaki and gray sang carols to each other, exchanged gifts of tobacco,  jam, sausage, chocolate and liquor, traded names and addresses and played soccer between the shell holes and barbed wire.  They even paid mutual trench visits.

This day is called "the most famous truce in military history" by British television producer Malcolm Brown and researcher Shirley Seaton in their book "Christmas Truce," published in 1984.

- "Enemies Kept Christmas Truce in Trenches 80 Years Ago," in the Elizabethton Star (December 25, 1994)

I'm Sure My Dad's Singing Along

One of my fondest memories of Christmas Eve is singing “Angels We Have Heard on High” alongside my father when I was about nine years old. Dad was a shy man, so he normally would sing hymns very softly. On this night, though, he sang it full bore, off-key, and with the deepest yearning that I had ever heard in him. Dad was drunk that night.

He was a melancholic, battered man, a World War II army veteran who saw many of his friends blown to bits. He sought refuge in alcohol, which made life pretty frightening for Mom, my older brother, Randy, and me. But in church I saw the gentle Cajun who grew up Catholic and who still feared God.

Only a few years after this Christmas Eve Service, my brother became a Jesus freak. Dad began reading the Bible to help my brother realize how far he had stepped off the deep end into religious extremism. Within a year Dad realized that my brother had found a relationship with Jesus that Dad had not discovered. So Dad surrendered to Jesus.

Then his drinking simply stopped. He still struggled with anger. We still argued about the length of my hair, my failure to practice the piano, and my halfhearted efforts at homework. Still, I began associating Dad more with love than with fear.

I spent nearly every Christmas with Dad until his death in 1992. We sang “Angels We Have Heard on High” together many times, but somehow my keenest memory is of Dad singing it with such yearning. Now, when I sing this carol, I know a small measure of the yearning Dad felt when I was a boy. I close my eyes and imagine Dad in heaven, singing along at the top of his redeemed lungs, feeling drunk on his adoration for God.

 — Douglas LeBlanc, Chesterfield, Virginia