Counting Down

Only three days left until we celebrate Jesus’ birthday.

I’ve had this snowman on my desk counting down the days until Christmas. I put him up right after Thanksgiving and, at the time, December was just starting and I wasn’t ready for Christmas to come. It meant more time by myself with Craig at work and longer days for him closing his store at 10 p.m.

I had all the time in the world to decide what we were going to give people, time to get all the presents, time to wrap them, and place them neatly under our tree.

Flash forward to yesterday…

I spent most of my day finishing up last minute Christmas shopping. With my new car, I naturally park as far out as I can to avoid door dings… but yesterday, in the cold wind; I was parking miles from the door of any store I visited. I can’t complain too much, I have two working legs that God blessed me with.

That wasn’t the issue, it was the fact I let it get to within four days of Christmas to finish everything up. Then it was on to wrapping. When you wrap a few packages at a time and then wrap more days later, this job isn’t so bad. If I had started my shopping sooner, I wouldn’t have had to wrap the majority of our packages all in one day! Curses to me for that one…

The worst part of all this, we hadn’t set up our Christmas tree. I know the tree isn’t “the reason for the season” but it made me feel like a bad Christian not to have some outward sign of my faith in my own home. Don’t even get me started on the fact we don’t have any decorations in our yard or on our house…

We had times set aside to set up the tree, but other things seemed to come first. Last night, we made the time. That one simple act of putting up a tree and turning on the lights made me feel much better about the Christmas season.

The tree is decorated and we have pretty packages underneath. Christmas is three days away… and now I can’t wait for His birthday to come.