Here's a blog post that caught my eye as we get ever closer to Christmas. This has been a great holiday season for me so far. Thanks to the "Presence" challenge I got all of my shopping done early and feel a lot more focused on Jesus and what His birth means for all of us. But I'm hosting a family Christmas this year and have a lot of activities going on over the next few weekends, so I'm beginning to feel that stress creep in. Here are some good reminders of what NOT to do at Christmas.
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Christmas is a bit nerve-wracking, isn’t it? I mean the stakes are high, and you’ve accumulated a few bad experiences along the way to remind you that things don’t always go as planned.
Despite our best intentions, Christmas is a high stress season with so much at stake. To raise the tension a little further, this may be your 35th Christmas, but it might only be your daughter’s fifth. I need to remind myself all the time that I’m writing the story of my kids’ childhood every day.
And we only get about 18 of these holidays before our kids grow up and leave home. So each one matters. Each Christmas is important. It might be just one more holiday for us grown-ups (special, as it is), but for kids, well, they’re like kids at Christmas.
So, how do you make Christmas better this year?
Sometimes the best way to figure out what works is to pay attention to what doesn’t work. In the spirit of Christmas, we thought we’d help. Here’s a list of 12 things guaranteed to help make Christmas miserable.
1. Head into Christmas exhausted, exposing your temper and nerves to everyonee.
2. Speak badly about other family members when they’re not in the room.
3. Overspend this Christmas trying to impress your kids with stuff they’ll throw away two years from now anyway.
4. Ignore the family members and neighbors who usually get ignored at this time of year anyway.
5. Focus the kids on what they’ll get for Christmas—not on what they could give.
6. Leave everything to the last minute so the tension runs high in the moments you should be making great memories.
7. If you share custody of your kids, be greedy in the time you want with the kids and try to outspend and outdo your ex.
8. Do nothing for the poor. Make it all about you and your wants.
9. Focus on what you don’t have, not on what you do have.
10. Obsess about the way your house looks and how perfect the meal needs to be.
11. Argue a lot over small things.
12. Let the celebration of Jesus end at church.
By Carey Nieuwhof
As we approach Christmas Day (4 days!!!!) my prayer for you and your children is that you experience the presence of God in a new way this season. Recently I was reminded of the awesomeness of the God we serve when I witnessed the funeral of 3 children who were taken suddenly from their family two weeks ago. A tragedy that could have turned into despair and an inward focus on loss was turned into an outward display of God's goodness and faithfulness. One of the kids recently told his grandfather that he was going to change the world in one day. With over 4,000 people attending and watching the funeral online, I think he did just that. So listening to their lives unfold, and hearing the stories that have come about from the aftermath of their death, I was reminded of how BIG and AWESOME our God really is! 
