I'm about to (okay, tomorrow) make my second post about Christmas and some (Pastor Heidi and Lisa to name a few) of you will I'm sure be noting that neither of the Christmas posts includes church. We didn't go to church on Christmas this year. I STRUGGLED with it. A LOT. I have witnesses. Ha ha. (I do though - that was no joke....)
To me, part of the beauty of going to church on Christmas is going at your church - where you know people, where you feel at home. I know that any church where Christians gather to celebrate the birth of Christ should offer fellowship and the Word and that should be enough. But for me, for whatever reason, it isn't - at least not on Christmas. Our church offers 3 services on Christmas Eve - the first at 3, and the last at 6 (or maybe 7). Because of the big dinner gathering on Steve's side, his mom always wants the siblings to get together before that to exchange our gifts (we used to do it after that, but with kids involved now, it just gets way too late if we do it that way).
To attend church on Christmas Eve we would either have to miss Christmas with Steve's siblings or we'd have to feed the kids a makeshift dinner in the car on the way home from Racine. I'm willing to entertain the second option in future years when the kids are more able to autonomously eat in the backseat in the dark - but for now, it's not a viable option.
There's just one service on Christmas Day at 9am. We could make that one - we did last year and I'm willing to bet we will again, but this year my mom wanted us at her house by 11:30 since we were working around several other schedules and the kids' naps. Although we could've made church and then just made it to my mom's in time, that would've meant only an hour or so for our own little family to share Christmas before we'd have to head out the door. Seeing as it's Colby's first Christmas at home, and he won't sit through church EVER and it's a struggle with Kailin most weeks, we decided in the end, that they wouldn't have gotten much out of church this year and that in the interest of being with family (of all shapes and sizes) we would skip it this year and do our own devotion at home.
I feel better having put it out there - in an honest sort of way, but I still struggle with it. We're already working on some kind of solution for next year because I enjoy church on Christmas and I'm surely not willing to give it up for scheduling! I'm happy to say that when I asked Kailin who had a birthday on Christmas, she didn't pause at all before saying "Jesus does!!" and then in typical Kailin fashion, went on to narrate that "when He was a baby, I was in China!!" We had to launch into a huge discussion about time... Oh - and when we talked about why we give gifts and I asked her if she knew what gifts the wisemen brought to baby Jesus, she reported that the wise men bringed the baby Jesus GOLD!!!!! (and she did yell gold really loudly, just so you know...)
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I hear ya about church at Christmas! It was a struggle for us this year without kids and travel! Christmas Eve was riddled with Rich working late and by the time dinner and gifts were all said and done, we wouldn't have made it to the second 10:30 pm mass of the day.
Everyone comes to our place Christmas Day and the only mass that day was 8:30, not enough time to prep and cook everything. It also doesn't help that our church is almost 1/2 hour away.
Better luck next year right??!!
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