…Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away.
– Proverbs: 27:10b
For many, the holiday season means the chance to connect with family. Some of us, however, find an emptiness when family is far away. A friend recently remarked that she has not been with her children on Christmas Day for years. One daughter is in Japan and a son and his family live in Oklahoma, he is the medical field and often works over the holidays.
While Roger was in the Navy, I remembered seeing houses lit up with Christmas lights in March or later. It meant that families were finally united after deployments, long after December 25.
For the first few years after Amanda was born, we visited both sets of grandparents – in different states. It was exhausting and confusing for a toddler to experience three different Christmases. With the addition of Caryn and with parents feeling too old to travel like that, we started sharing Christmas Eve with neighbors, who like us had families far away.
That tradition has grown into a Christmas celebration with 20 to 30 friends spanning three generations. Now, one of the neighbor girls threw a spanner into the routine by marrying a Lutheran pastor. They are pretty busy on Christmas Eve, so we changed our get together to the 23, so Christmas Eve became Christmas Adam! It’s ironic that we moved our party further from Christmas for religious reasons, but it works.
So, as we prepare for our decades-long celebration I embrace another Bible verse.
Two are better than one…. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!
– Ecclesiastes 4: 9-10
It’s a great feeling knowing that so many will soon celebrate with me.
