Borrowing just a title from one of my favourite Christian singer/songwriters, Ali Matthews—Love came down at Christmas. I think she won’t mind too much as I’m including her song and, well, I happen to know her too.

I was reflecting this evening on my granddaughters’ and others’ anticipation of Christmas. Christmas is coming. It’s in the future, some day soon. For them the waiting is hard, and the anticipation keen. They count down the days on their Advent calendar, not one with chocolates, but numbers.

Yesterday, one of them asked, “How many days?”

And, her mother said, “One nine, and tomorrow it will be…?”

And daughter guesses, “One zero.”

“If you go back to one, you have to wait longer.” And she smiles.

And the five-year-old thinks on this.

I smile, having had such conversations with my children when they were as young as my daughter’s children. And I think, too, of how long God’s people waited for the Saviour they had read about in the scriptures. Surely it couldn’t be long now. But we know from historical accounts that  it was, indeed, years and years. Hundreds of years and more. They  thought of the Saviour who would come. And Mary, Jesus’ mother-to-be. Must the time have seemed long to her? Did she feel ready for this large responsibility?

We talk about the waiting too, but with anticipation of days and weeks. It’s not long now. In a few days we’ll say, “The Saviour comes,” and we time it by the liturgical calendar, and soon the day is here and we celebrate.

Too soon the day is over and we say, “It was a good day”  or “over so quickly.” We move into the past tense regarding Christmas, even though the season is much longer than one day. But if we remember the reason for this celebration, we acknowledge what Jesus did for us and how much God loved us to send this baby into the world. He came for all of us, whether we are sad or glad or somewhere in between, in whatever place we are now.

And so I encourage you to look up the story (Luke 2) and read it over and think about the celebration and what it really means. May you receive God’s blessing and peace this Christmas.