The irony of Christmas

Waking up at 5am and feeling the unmistakable weight of a stocking loaded down with presents by your toes.  Jumping out of bed and running into your parents room to empty the stocking and rip the paper off - silly string, chocolate oranges, party poppers, a DVD, a book, a water pistol to chase your brother around the house with.  Realising that your allowed to eat as much chocolate as you want BEFORE breakfast!

Getting downstairs to find a roast gammon for breakfast, eggs, fresh home-made bread and your favourite juice on the table already.  Spotting the huge pile of presents under the tree and knowing it'll take you all afternoon to open them, build them and learn how to use them.

These are my memories of Christmas morning as a child.

Christmas was full of expectations fulfilled and beauty realised.  That was then.

I still have these same expectations.  I still delight to be surprised. I still try to get excited about chocolate before breakfast, but the truth is I want a cup of tea and anyway I'm trying to lose 2 stone before the cricket season starts...

As I've grown up I got closer to the very heart of Christmas.  I now know what it takes to put together a stocking for a small child (and a wife).  I now know what it takes to prepare a Christmas meal, to load a car up and drive across the country and I even know why my dad didn't let me drink his whiskey!

So now Christmas is full of expectations moderated by experience and beauty analysed and dissected.

I’ll be honest; Christmas has lost some of its luster.  My great hopes for it have been diminished and my ecstatic enjoyment has been tempered to something close to cold mechanics.

Here’s the irony:

This is exactly why Christmas exists at all.  It exists precisely because our great hopes for life have been diminished and our ecstatic enjoyment of life has been reduced to mechanics.

Jesus came precisely so that we can have ‘life and life to the full’.  He knows our lives are full of diminished expectations and things we've 'got to do'.  He came to restore hope.  He came to raise our expectations through the stratosphere and he promises to meet them.

When you’re taking down your decorations and polishing off the last mince pie and feeling slightly cheated… let that feeling point you to the one who will never cheat you, never let you down and give you great joy in all times.