REPOST FROM NOVEMBER 22, 2025

REPOSTING FROM MY FACEBOOK PAGE DATED NOVEMBER 22, 2025

 

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. We never started our Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving. But I’m thinking that the most important event to celebrate with thankfulness is Jesus' birth, life, death, and resurrection. It’s okay to overlap the holidays. 

My husband loved Christmas. Now, to be clear, he often said that Jesus never told us to celebrate His birth. Jesus did say to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in remembrance of Him.  The most important celebration is His Sacrificial Substitutionary Death, His burial in a borrowed tomb and His powerful Resurrection after three days in the grave. We understand that. 

1 Corinthians 11:23-25 Holman Christian Standard Bible 23 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: On the night when He was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, 24 gave thanks, broke it, and said, “This is My body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.”25 In the same way, after supper He also took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant established by My blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.”

But my husband  loved the lights on the house, having multiple Christmas trees, the music (both sacred and secular), the nativity scenes, the decorations, giving gifts, having kids and grandkids around. We didn’t lie to our children and tell them that Santa was watching, and they had to be good so he would bring them presents, but we had Santa decorations. We had stuffed animals that sang Christmas songs. Every Christmas until he was too sick to do so, he always bought me nice gifts. 

After he was no longer able to buy me presents, he would get mad at me if I bought him gifts. I came up with a deceptive plan. I would order him something he wanted or needed and have it shipped to my son’s house. My daughter-in-love would wrap it for me. I would send a message to all the other children that they needed to sign the card before he brought the present inside. My husband never caught on. Looking back, I wonder if he thought the kids loved him more than they loved me because they never went together to buy me nice presents. 🙂

This is the third Christmas since he died. Every Christmas since then has been different. I don’t think it's the stages of grief, because I didn’t grieve after he died. Don’t get me wrong. I grieved for years as his health progressively became worse. I grieved for the emotional changes in him as he suffered physically. After he died, I remembered pleasant things, sad things, heartbreaking things, but my grief ended. 

The first Christmas after he died, I basically did the minimum that needed to be done. Last year a little more. This year I’m inching toward the kind of Christmas celebration he loved so much.  I went to the storage and dug out decorations we hadn’t used in years. Many of them did not work anymore and ended up in the garbage can. Others, though worn and faded, showed 48 years of memories with him and our family. I’m not sad. I have pleasant memories.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 Holman Christian Standard Bible 13 We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope. 14 Since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, in the same way God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep through Jesus.

Some friends had sent a wreath to his funeral. It was a grapevine wreath with greenery around it and a cross in the middle. It’s been hanging on my front door since then. I took it down yesterday and put up a Christmas wreath. Then today, I had an idea. I hung it on the back porch and put bright cheerful Christmas lights around it. I thought it was appropriate. The Cross is at the center of Christmas. That was the plan from before creation.  

It’s a little less than a week until Thanksgiving, yet we are preparing to celebrate Jesus’ birth, God Himself taking human form to bear the weight of our sin to the cross. Let’s mesh these celebrations as we show thankfulness for God’s plan to provide forgiveness and salvation through His birth, death, and resurrection. 

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Joyful Resurrection Day.