Ever notice how the pace of mall shoppers escalates the closer Christmas looms? No leisurely window shopping for these folks. Not to mention the horn honking congestion and zooming to beat someone to the last parking place near the door. Not that I’ve ever done that…
Are you in panic mode like me, with a week to Christmas and my third notification screaming—”DELAYED SHIPMENT—your item will now deliver in January!” YIKES!
My smug assumption of being finished with shopping and four weeks to spare—collapses like a cheap tent. What should be fun—perusing the rainbow of displays—shopping for that perfect something for that special someone suddenly looms like a nightmare full of disappointed faces around the Christmas tree.
The “experts” warned us of limited inventory this holiday season. Though I knew shortages existed, I just thought the hype teased us in a marketing ploy. If I ordered items on black Friday saying they would arrive mid-December, I thought I was golden. Not so it seems from the emails shouting, “delayed, delayed, delayed.”
I justified my waiting to shop until Black Friday and Cyber Monday because they keep me from overbuying. Not such a good idea this year, it seems. One of my assistants spoke truth into the matter. She said, “If I buy early, I buy more. I forget what I already bought, or I find more things I just can’t pass up.”
In a November article by Alexis Leondis in Bloomberg Opinion, she states, “…if shoppers buy too early in the season, the pain of payment often recedes so that as the holidays near, they wind up adding more to the pile of gifts than they had intended.”
So as we ping-pong through stores and despair at the online shops littered with “out of stock,” it’s easy to forget the “why” of this season.
It’s not the tinsel and trappings.
It’s not the packages and parties.
It’s not the food and festivity.
The “why” is a child born in a lowly stable two thousand years ago.
A boy who would learn to walk the dusty path of lonely pain.
And grow into a man
Shunned,
Despised,
And Beloved.
“He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, A man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, And we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God. Stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgression, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
And by his wounds we are healed.“
Isaiah 53:2-5
My panic-induced merry-go-round grinds down to the pace of a turtle race in light of His precious gift. And I confess shame at getting pulled into the whirlpool of consumerism, sucking me toward a vortex that promises perfection but delivers disappointment again and again.
So rather than succumb to the panic the media nudges me toward, this last week before Christmas, will you join me as I—
Slow my pace,
Take a deep breath,
And remember His gift daily?
Because my friends, His birth and the hope it brought to a dark and dying world—is the real reason for the season.
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
John 1:14
Merry Christmas, Y’all!