>The Most Wonderful Gift

>Christmas is in two days and…

We’re all recovering from swine flu.

We skipped some a lot most of our Jesse Tree devotionals.

We totally forgot to send out presents to a few extended family members.

We still haven’t made our gingerbread house.

We didn’t make it to the live nativity.

We’ve done absolutely no baking.

We’ve waited until the very last minute to wrap presents.

I should feel like this Christmas has been one big, huge, swine flu-filled failure. But I don’t. In fact, I’ve already deemed this Christmas season a magnificent success. Because a few days ago, my daughter brought this home from school.

I volunteered in her class on the day she was given this assignment, so I knew the teacher had written “Christmas is—” on the board and told the children to finish the sentence however they were able to.

When it comes to spelling, Punky’s still working on a little thing called ‘vowels.’ But I could tell what she was trying to say. And I can also tell you that when I was five years old, this is the absolute last thing I would have written. Despite the fact that we were proper Baptists and I went to church two times a week, Christmas would have been PRESENTS! Or SANTA CLAUS! Or… or… PRESENTS!

I’ve spent the last three years trying to weave the story of Jesus’s birth into the fun of our family’s Christmas traditions. And I have worried that my efforts would be totally drowned out by all the toy commercials and secular teachings at school and non-religious store decorations and television shows and the very fact that it’s incredibly hard for a baby born in a stable two thousand years ago to compete with a jolly fat man who has elves! And a toy factory!

But somehow, some way, Punky got it.

Christmas is bb Jess bfday!

That’s exactly what it is. Plain and simple. My five-year-old has down what so many of us who are older and wiser have completely forgotten.

I’ve already gotten my gift this Christmas. And it’s more than I had ever hoped for.