I finished my Christmas shopping today. I’ll accept your applause and congratulatory wishes. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Clearly, I’m exaggerating the importance of this accomplishment but it does feel good to get finished doesn’t it?
It’s quite the chore for most of us. There’s a lot of stress involved. Well, at least there is for me. Who all do I need to buy for? How much to buy? How much to spend? When am I going to get to it all? Did I forget anyone? Oh, now I need to wrap it all? That means more stuff. Like paper, boxes, bags, bows, tissue paper and name tags and a fair amount of time and space.
As I was thinking about all that on my way home from shopping, I couldn’t help but remember the Christmas when I got that Easton baseball bat you see in the picture. I was somewhere around 10 or 12 – Little League age. We always had a special Christmas with my godparents and their children. There were five of us kids total – me, my sister and their two sons and daughter.
At that time we each got a stocking full of smaller things and then one main gift. That particular Christmas the younger girls got matching talking dolls (which none of us remember fondly). Meanwhile the boys got one of the early edition home versions of Laser Tag. I got that baseball bat. I can remember sitting there happy to have such a bat but a little frustrated as I watched the other four run enthusiastically playing with their toys. Not only did I have a gift I couldn’t play with at the time, but I really couldn’t use it for a few months.
It took me a while to see the real value of that gift. I am now 43, and I still have that bat. I can promise that for all the excitement the baby dolls and Laser Tag provided in the moment, they were short-lived. The real gift that Christmas was not even the bat but the lesson I learned from it.
I think of another Christmas just a few years later. I’d say I was maybe in the 8th or 9th grade. It was the year that everyone, and I mean everyone in that general age bracket, wanted a leather bomber jacket. I guess it was popularity everyone was seeking rather than warmth. I didn’t have any cool points to spare so you had better believe I wanted one, too. These were pretty expensive if you got the real deal. I want to ballpark them around $200, but I could be wrong.
As she did every year, my Mom picked a kid off the angel tree. This particular year she picked a girl in my age bracket who wanted a leather bomber jacket. She took me shopping with her and proceeded to buy that girl a leather jacket. I didn’t get one. I was crushed that Christmas when my Mom bought what I wanted for someone else and not me. She maintained that the other child likely needed the jacket while I simply wanted it.
She also took that opportunity to teach me a healthy lesson. Sometime later that winter she did buy me a leather jacket, but honestly by then I had lost interest. I wore it some, but it was never the big deal I had made it in my mind. Despite it’s price tag, there was little value in the jacket for me because I didn’t need or truly want it. I wanted to have what everyone else had but I couldn’t have cared less about the actual jacket.
I always buy for a couple of extra kids at Christmas – in part because of the lesson of that leather jacket taught me. My husband and I have bought for two additional children this year. It’s one of the highlights of the season for me every year. We always make our kids help. I want them to see the value in giving more than receiving.
I hope we can all reflect on things of value this season. I hope we can see beyond the surface of the special gifts we receive. People who love us took the time to be thoughtful and give us something they thought we would really enjoy – even if it’s not shiny and exciting on Christmas Day.
I hope we can spend more time giving than receiving. I don’t just mean giving gifts. I meaning giving our time and energy to some things that matter. At the top of the list for me, are spending time with the people I love most, instilling lifelong values into my children instead of chasing popularity, giving resources to people and organizations who can best maximize the good works they’re doing and reflecting on the only gift that really matters – Jesus.
This is what adds value to not just my Christmas season but my life as a whole. I get as upset as anyone when life doesn’t go my way or I see injustice and just plain cruelness that seems to run rampant these days. But during this season that often lends itself to a little more softness and a little more caring, I want to make sure that what I’m doing is adding value to my corner of the world. In my experience, that’s the only thing that really stands the test of time.
Friends, it’s easy to get bogged down in the chaos of the season and the crush of “buy this” and “do that” but let me urge you to spend the bulk of whatever resource you have to offer on things of value. May we all see the eternal value of Christmas this year.
