Every year, during the Christmas season, my mother reads aloud Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Every year, we never get to the end. We have a glorious large illustrated book of this story, and every year I pour over the illustrations. Every year my father does puzzles while listening and informs us, “We’re going to finish the story this year.” This is one of many Mohrlang Christmas traditions.
I love traditions, and my family is certainly not lacking. We cut our Christmas tree from the local back woods; sometimes we tie two together. Our neighbors poke fun at the Ponderosa Pine that lives inside our house during December, and we spend the month putting ornaments back on the tree that slide off the long, slippery needles. We make sugar cookies, and I make it my goal to bake ridiculous amounts of red-hot cinnamons into the top of all the cookies. Every year my father finds all the “Christ-coming-to-this-world” stories in the Bible (not just Luke and Matthew, but the beginnings of John, 1st John, sometimes the beginning of Romans) and reads them aloud over the course of Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.
I love traditions because traditions create anticipation and hope. I live in expectation that something great will happen, and this is not some nebulous expectation, it is an expectation built on the reality of great things happening in the past. This is why I love Advent. We celebrate the amazing tradition of our God joining us here and transforming our lives. Every year we live in hope that Christ will come to us, and every year, He does. Every year Christ is here, and every year we hope that Christ will eventually come again. We hope because He came before.
Every year I look forward to the start of A Christmas Carol, and every year I look forward to the continuing celebration of Christ starting His amazing work in our lives.
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