Many years ago, our family went to a Christmas party. A children’s gift shop was offered for kids to shop for family Christmas gifts. You know the type: often stocked with dollar store finds, silly items, or discarded, unwanted gifts no one else claimed. Our kids enjoyed shopping for gifts, wrapping them, and returning home with bags of goodies. One of our sons, AJ, was bursting with pride over...
One of my best friends went to Harvard. Our freshman year, we came back for Christmas break and exchanged stories from our different colleges. He told me that their semester hadn’t ended. He had to study for finals and work on projects during the break. How horrible! I thought. That would be so stressful, wouldn’t it? How could a person enjoy the holidays with pressure like that? Now, as a...
Martin Luther loved Christmas. He preached extensively about it, wrote two Christmas hymns, and is even credited with inventing the Christmas tree. As the story goes, the 16th century reformer was walking home one winter evening and was so captivated by the brilliance of stars shining through evergreen tress that he wanted to recreate the scene for his family. He put up a tree in the main room...
Did you ever wonder what the oldest Christmas tradition is? Some of our most beloved traditions are relatively recent in origin. Take Christmas lights, for example. I remember screwing in bulbs into sockets on strings as a boy with my father but that tradition began by one of Thomas Edison’s engineers in 1882. Edward Johnson, looking for a way to sell Edison’s newly manufactured electric bulbs...
Thanksgiving is here—the holiday that is billed as the time for each of us to stop and give thanks. But is that really always possible? We are in the middle of a pandemic and are living in a polarized world with deep political and racial divisions. And those are just our public problems. We also each have our private list of things that are making life hard. Our family, like many others, notices...
