Preparing for Christmas

The time of the Lord is coming! We are getting ready to celebrate Christmas, while the secular world is already celebrating it. I pray that you will not get tired of the “holiday season” before it even begins! We as a Church will begin to celebrate Christmas at the vigil Mass on Christmas Eve and celebrate it until the Baptism of the Lord.

We are often drawn into the “regular” or secular way of saying and doing things for example Santa Claus. Tradition holds that the name came from a mishearing or mispronunciation of Sint Klaes, which is the Dutch way of saying Saint Nicholas. Saint Nicholas, whose feast day is Wednesday, December 6th, was well known for a couple of things: the first, giving three bags of gold to a poor man for a dowry for his three daughters to save them from a life of prostitution. The account goes that there was a man who had three daughters and he was too poor to put together a dowry, which would mean that the young women would not be married and, in those days, it was not easy for a woman to get a job, especially someone who was poor to begin with. There are different accounts of how it happened but it goes that St. Nicholas threw a bag of money into the house on three consecutive nights/weeks/months, and was caught by the man on the third time. It is also a tradition that one or all of the bags were put in the shoes of the girls, which is where we get the tradition of putting chocolate coins in shoes. The second thing that St. Nicholas was famous for is slapping the heretic Arius in the face during an argument about whether or not Jesus was really God.

As we begin the Advent season this year and we prepare for the upcoming Christmas season, we want to keep reminding our children that there is a real reason for the Christmas season and that is that God loves us so much that He sent His Son Jesus to be with us. We hear the phrase that we should keep Christ in Christmas and the best way to do that is to be a good and joyful Christian. The example of how we act is one of the great things we can give to our children, whether it be the joyful celebration of the Holy Mass, or the way that we treat our neighbors, even those we do not like. I will sometimes say that the best way to keep Christ in Christmas is to keep Mass in Christmas since the greatest prayer we have in the Church is the reminder of the depth of the love that Christ has for us in his sacrifice that we celebrate in the Mass.

In this busy time, we prepare for the coming of the Lord, keep reminding ourselves who we are going to be receiving in the real Christmas season, Christ the Lord.

God bless,
Fr. Ken