Every Christmas of my unmarried life started with those three words. "Did he come? Did he come?" My mother would ask my sister and I as we waited for Dad to give the OK for us to enter the den. My mother was referring to Santa Clause. However, now that I am older and closer to the Lord those words have a totally different meaning for me.
By the time Ivan came home J and I were much more mature in our spiritual lives than when we got married nine years before. As people who felt closer to the Lord we wanted to share that relationship with our new son. Our first Christmas with Ivan we wanted to start off right and make sure that it wasn't all about Santa. We wanted to find a way to balance Santa and Jesus. We planned a Birthday Party for Jesus with my sister and her children. We read stories about Jesus' birth. Finally, we decided to take the baby Jesus out of the manger scenes that we have around the house. Ivan was so little at that time that he never noticed the abrupt change. On Christmas morning Jesus "arrives" in the manger scenes and stays with us until Epiphany. Now that Ivan is older he notices right away that the babe is not in the manger. He asks when he will arrive and J and I tell him "When he is born on Christmas day!" This is the first year that he seems to know that it is not a mystical force that brings the babies to their appropriate scenes on Christmas morning, but in fact Mom and Dad. That's OK with me though. By leaving the baby out Ivan stays tuned in to the manger scene beyond the first day that it is set out. The first several days that they were out he would look periodically to see if perhaps something may have changed. He's since stopped checking, but he has told several people that he is looking forward to the arrival of the baby Jesus' at our house Christmas morning.
So now when I ask Ivan on Christmas morning "Did He Come? Did He Come?" I am not talking about Santa but the true reason for this wonderful season, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Blessedly I can answer that with a resounding "YES! And He will come again someday!!"
