Friday, December 08, 2006

Getting ready for Christmas

As my family gets ready for Christmas, it seems we find ourselves somewhat in the same mood as Madame Blueberry when she arrived home to see what the "stuff" she had purchased had wrought. Unlike her, my family awaits another onslaught of "stuff" from our dear relatives--and we are already enduring the wish lists of our precious little ones.

Just as Madame Blueberry found out, we're also learning how having too much stuff can wreck your home. So four to six times per year, we end up loading a few boxes of excess clothes, toys, kitchen gadgets, and more into the minivan or pickup to take it to Goodwill. The scary thing is that we generally didn't buy a bit of it.

Such is the nature of our society. Anyone who isn't careful can quickly fill a 3000 square foot home (or larger) with things that are essentially garbage, locking himself into huge debt and quite likely a job they can't stand. Christ was truly right when He noted that we cannot serve both God and mammon.

Let's keep this in mind for His birthday party--maybe by choosing gifts of high quality that can be consumed instead of the biggest box we can get for < $50 at Wal-Mart or Target.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We will all recieve a couple of gifts this year in our family. But we are concentrating on giving. We want to express our gratitude to those who have been a blessing to us. Therefore, we pray our children are seeing a principle grounded not only in getting a gift (as with Christ) but in giving a gift (as God gave unto us).

My wife and children have been busy making several of the gifts we will give this year. And in this way I think your idea applies. We aren't necessarily giving the biggest gifts, but we're giving those of high quality, those that came from our own hearts and hands.