Christmas Presence

Our focus for this Christmas season has been Christmas Presence. Many years ago I found Chieko Okazaki's talk-turned-booklet "Christmas Presence" in a Christmas clearance bin and found it so inspiringly instructive. Because the holidays are too often focused on Christmas presents, I pulled this out this year to use as the spine for our December devotionals. It begins:

"As an educator, I was always delighted when children would discover some of the wonderful games you can play with language in the creation of puns, and images, and literalisms--such as, 'Have you ever seen a butterfly?' 'No, but I've seen the lettuce leaf.' Or how about the games you can play with homonyms, such as horse and hoarse? I would like to share some thoughts about another pair of homonyms:  Christmas presents and Christmas presence.

"We all know about the first kind. Christmas presents come wrapped in bright paper with beg red bows on them, and we find them under the Christmas tree. The second kind is the awareness that someone else is with us--the Christmas presence of our Savior. The scriptures describe both kinds for us. The first is the present as a gift, and the scriptures refer to us laying our gifts on the altar, kings giving gifts to prophets and other kings, God accepting Abel's  gift, and the wise men presenting unto the Christ child their gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. In the second case, we find Adam and Eve hiding themselves from the presence of God, Moses coming into the presence of Pharaoh, and the commandment in Psalms to come into the presnece of the Lord with singing. It is this second kind I want to examine--the presence of the Lord, the presence of his love, the presence of his grace." 

Sister Okazaki goes on to discuss the importance of each of us giving the gift of our presence to those we love or even just come in contact with--being fully present in our interactions.

One example she uses in her book is the story of Rob's gift in Pearl S. Buck's Christmas Day in the Morning. She quotes some of it and summarizes and analyzes some of it, but later I read the full story to my children. It's a lovely story.

I gave my kids a writing assignment after reading and discussing these. They were to write about an instance or a person wherein they were given the gift of someone's presence and why it was important to them. I loved reading what they wrote! Each one wrote about someone/something vastly different from the others, but they were so meaningful and insightful.

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P.S. It is really hard to find this booklet nowadays. I have found it in person only twice, both times in Christmas clearance for just 50 cents. Keep your eyes open! An internet search brings up really rare, expensive copies for sale. It's good, but I wouldn't pay $25 for it!