Traditions

Sometimes when I look at what I do, I feel like a surprising amount of my time is dealing with tradition.  Sometimes I’m striving to not break some traditions of the church, or sometimes, I’m striving to break traditions that either aren’t Biblically accurate, or have become idols to the church.  I’m not a big observer of traditions in my personal life.  Matter of fact, I can’t think of many.  The traditions we kept growing up have largely become less relevant as we’ve grown up and started our own families.

The main season where traditions seem to creep in is Christmas.  The joy of starting our family is that Jodie and I are starting our own Christmas traditions.  We’ve talked about some like doing three gifts on Christmas morning, each tied to the wise men and the gifts they brought to Jesus.  Of course, Isaac obviously isn’t ready to open gifts, so that one is a future tradition.

What I wanted to talk about is the Christmas Eve tradition that we’re starting this year.  We had a really nice dinner together to celebrate the year, the blessings of family, and our Savior.  We followed up with singing through the music for the Christmas Eve service that was cancelled this year.  I look forward with great anticipation to the day when Isaac is old enough to sing along, or even one day play the hymns on the piano as his family sings along.  It may sound odd, but I find it difficult to work music into the daily grind here at home.  I wonder if it’s because I spend every day thinking about worship music for the coming Sunday, the following week, and anything larger that I’m working on.  So this is a chance to share the gifts God has given both of us together.

And finally we read the Christmas story from Luke.  I know that all kinds of families out there read “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” but considering that we’re not going to teach Isaac that Santa is real (something about teaching him about a being who supposedly can read thoughts, travel quickly and perform miracles, only to tell him years later that we were actually lying to him about the whole thing seems to set up confusion when we talk about God and Jesus, Who actually are real!), we’d rather focus on why we just spent the last three months celebrating this holiday, Christmas (Jodie starts up the Christmas music in early October).

I hope that you’ve found your special Christmas traditions in your home, and I pray you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

http://www.youtube.com/v/gRdfX7ut8gw&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0

(Sorry, I couldn't help myself!)