Christmas Traditions

One of the reasons this is the “most wonderful time for the year” for me is that we get to participate in all our favorite “family traditions.”  Highlights of the past and present Drake traditions include:

- A fondue Christmas Eve dinner before attending a late church service.

- Leaving cookies (elves), carrots (reindeer), and Jack Daniels (to keep Santa warm on cold
  Winter nights my dad always said) in front of the fireplace.

- Never being allowed downstairs before 7am.

- Reading the Christmas story from Luke 2 then opening stockings, having a long breakfast with   
  sticky buns before finally!! opening presents.

- Growing up we had a wonderful Christmas dinner mid afternoon and always went to the  
  movies Christmas night.

As a Christian who worships the Lord in the Anglican tradition, I have grown to appreciate “traditions”: ways of worshiping Jesus that are familiar, authentic, and meaningful. Our liturgy, in all its Anglican varieties, offers a familiar context to worship each week filled with good theology, scripture, and invitations to engage the Lord in confession, prayer, and praise. As we begin to understand and know the reason for these weekly and yearly “traditions” that make up our worship, we begin to understand and know the Lord better.  

This Christmas, as we celebrate family traditions, may the gift of celebrating the yearly remembrance of our Lord’s entrance into human history fill us with anticipation, excitement, wonder and joy as  we worship the One from whom all our Christmas and weekly worship traditions find their true meaning.