Keeping Christmas comes so naturally to children. They’re brilliant at it, which means there was a time when the same could said for us as well. A time when it required no effort at all, because for most of us, Christmas Day encircled our limited worlds like a magic ring and left nothing out for us to miss or seek. It bound together all our hopes and we loved about home. It brought everything and everyone around the Christmas fire, making the little picture shining in our bright young eyes complete.
Do you remember it this way? Can you recall your own “young Christmas Days” as Charles Dickens did in his writings? The makings of a perfect Christmas are much simpler than we think…which should come as a huge relief {next year} for every person settling down for a long winter’s nap tonight, exhausted from all your best intentions and efforts to create your best illusion of the perfect Christmas for the people you love.
Try to remember next year that what we all want, more than presents, is to receive the people dear to us as the gifts they truly are, and welcome all that was ever real to our hearts…what has been, what never was, what we hope may be…around the Christmas fire, where what is, sits openhearted.
This is the art of keeping Christmas. Not hard at all, really. Love is already in the room, opening hearts. All we have to do is stop for a moment to listen. And respond. In that moment, we remember what we knew as children, and realize we can once again be a keeper, a guardian and preserver, of that love every day.
What if…we let Christmas wrap itself around us like a blanket, as intangible as a fragrance. And let it be a day for remembering everything we have ever loved? ~ Augusta E. Rundel
What if…no matter how we may dread the rush, the long Christmas lists for gifts and cards to be bought and given, when Christmas Day comes there is still the same warm feeling we had as children, the same warmth that enfolds our hearts and our homes? ~ Joan Winmill Brown
What if…Keeping Christmas is more about being willing to stoop down and consider the needs and desires of little children; to remember the weakness and loneliness of people growing old; to stop asking how much our friends love us, and ask ourselves whether we love them enough; to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear in their hearts; to try to understand what those who live in the same home with us really want, without waiting for them to tell us; to make a grave for our ugly thoughts, and a garden for our kindly feelings with the gate open?
Being in the company of children on Christmas Day is one of the few occasions on which grownups become entirely alive? ~ Robert Lynd
What if…we lived that way every single day — entirely alive and openhearted?
Then, my friends, we would be known as true keepers of Christmas, able to exclaim any time of year to all who will listen, “It’s a Wonderful Life!”
The UnbridledACTS family wishes you and your family a wonderful Christmas, wrapped in the Love that welcomes every heart…no matter our age.
