Celebrating Christmas

A confession: I've been a wee bit Scrooge-like this holiday season. While we are ever so grateful that Michael is in a residency that we both like quite a lot, considering that it is still a surgical residency, I feel compelled to bah humbug a bit about spending our first Christmas in a new city not only without our extended family, but also without our own little family of four all together. Michael, it turns out, will be spending the twenty-fifth day in December at the hospital.

After Grinching about for the better part of a week, I had this thought: What are we celebrating, anyway? We know from our friends in Whoville that it's not about ribbons or boxes or bags, or trees, lights, or reindeer-shaped cookies. It's not even about the music, although you guys, Pandora's been locked on the Mannheim Steamroller station since before the last trick-or-treater left our neighborhood.

Christmas, then, is about family, a special family, that winked into existence as all families do with the birth of an extraordinary baby. Christmas celebrates that child who grew up to be Christ. Who never turned away the sick or lonely, and especially not the children, not when He was tired or it was inconvenient, and probably He went out helping people on Yom Kippur and Hannukah, even when His ever-graceful mom just wanted to have a sit-down meal with the whole family together.

And if that's how He whose birth we celebrate spent His time, how can I begrudge Michael's residency giving him the opportunity to pay tribute to Christ by tending to the sick and showing compassion to those who would surely also rather be home with their families?

So here's our Christmas: we will celebrate on the twenty-fourth or twenty-sixth with the music and the food and the presents and the children festooned with ribbons and bows. And on Christmas, we will celebrate Christ.