It’s Christmas Eve at the farm on Willow Road. We’ve had some unseasonably warm weather here over the last few days with a lot of rain and mist on the fields – fallow except for those planted with winter wheat. We saw our neighbor Jim Laramie earlier, who stopped by with the most amazing homemade toffee. He told us it was his first year trying his hand at it, and all I can say is that it was quite a success. We are even now hovering around the computer for the Skype call with our friend Malcolm from the U.K. There’s a fire in hearth, cranberry glazed pork tenderloin waiting for dinner; and after the maddening rush of Christmas preparation, we’re finally feeling the permission to breath again.

I have to admit at the outset that I came into this season with a tiny bit of dread. It wasn’t necessarily the quickening pace of our lives with all of the holiday expectations (we’re still “that family” that puts out 150 or so Christmas cards – and the list is only growing!). Actually, it took me a while and some real soul searching over the last month or so to put my finger on it.

The first string I picked up and followed was the realization that I wasn’t anticipating the Christmas gift exchange. Normally I’m at the front of the line with a list of the things I want; but when Jocelyn asked me what I wanted last month, I couldn’t come up with a thing. Even scarier, it wasn’t because I was feeling any sense of contentment with what I had. As I pondered it, I realized that it was a weariness of this practice of endless acquisition that we westerners seem to be locked in. I had simply become “gadgeted out.”

I also spent a lot of time thinking through my holiday malaise as I listened to Christmas songs on the radio (and yes, I waited until after Thanksgiving). It’s amazing how they can conjure up so much sentimentality with the warm images of family coming together and the anticipation of Christmas morning. After years of great family memories, the older generation’s passing and exodus of the younger generation across the country have thinned out the celebration of Christmas on the farm. What’s more, it felt as if the songs I once enjoyed became an inventory of the experiences that were more in my past than my present – or my future.

And I very well could have stayed in that funk, but I believe I was quite literally delivered by a Christmas carol you’ll rarely hear on the radio. Dating back to the 12th century, the Wexford Carol is one of the oldest carols that we know of in the European tradition; and it was the first verse that reached out and captured my heart:

Good people all, this Christmas time,
Consider well and bear in mind
What our good God for us has done
In sending his beloved son
With Mary holy we should pray,
To God with love this Christmas Day
In Bethlehem upon that morn,
There was a blessed Messiah born

To consider well and bear anything in mind can be a real trick in the crush of the holiday treadmill – much less the spectacular thing that happened in that town in a backwater Roman province no one had ever heard of. How easily we – I – forget. But in those simple words I was reminded again of the gift that outweighs anything I could have gotten from Amazon. Amid all of the wonder that our holiday-industrial complex offers, this was the thing my heart longed for.

And somewhere in the second hundred playbacks of “Happy Holidays”, I started to realize that instead of mourning the loss of all of the family experiences of years past, it was far more life giving to be grateful that I ever had the opportunity to have those marvelous experiences in the first place.

Even better? Out of an overflow of that grateful heart, I need to pour myself out to give others a beautiful Christmas memory. So with my heart steeled with that conviction, let the real holiday begin…