Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here’s this week’s!

A few years ago, I was walking through a department store on November 1 when I saw something that made me grumpy. Lining the aisles in front of me were Christmas trees. Christmas. In November. Given that the previous night I had been greeted by witches and princesses and baby bunnies at the door asking for candy, the Christmas rush seemed rather premature.

Perhaps that’s why I have such a hard time getting in the Christmas spirit. It is not that I dread Christmas; on the contrary, it’s one of my favourite times of year. But when Christmas lasts months and months, with all its commercialism, sometimes even the lure of Grandma’s mashed potatoes and gravy can’t bring me out of my Scrooge-like mood.

This year I’ve had an even tougher time than usual, partly because I haven’t been doing much shopping. When the children in your family hit the teen years, cash and gift cards replace the Christmas feeling I used to get when fighting for parking spaces in crowded malls. Combine that with extra work deadlines in December, and others I know are coming in January, and Christmas receded far in the back of my mind.

So it was that two weeks ago I decided to confront my lack of Christmas spirit by finally putting up the Christmas tree. This year my daughters decided they wanted the tree to actually look attractive, rather than something out of a flea market, which is more the norm when one has as many homemade decorations as we are blessed with. In a pique of decorating frenzy, they tried to only hang decorations that coordinated. Yet somehow my thirty-five year old Baby Jesus Birthday Cake candle holders still made the cut, as did the homemade glitter stars with pictures of the girls as toddlers. Looking perfect, I guess, is never as satisfying as meaningful memories.

Our eclectic family tree was up, but I was still feeling distinctly un-Christmaslike. I decided drastic action was required, so when a group from church announced they were carolling last weekend, I went along. Nothing like getting in the Christmas spirit as singing songs to strangers while one’s toes freeze!

Ambition and energy returning, I grabbed the flour and the eggs and started baking, including a concoction of chocolate chip cheesecake squares which may cause one nephew to ask for sweets in lieu of cash. And now, as the actual day approaches, I’m finally feeling excited.

Excited about family, and mashed potatoes, and turkey, and Grandma’s gravy—even if sitting around the family table can also be bittersweet, since it’s also a stark reminder of who is no longer with us.

Excited about Christmas morning, when I’ll be surrounded by just my girls, and my man, and my mom, with cups of hot chocolate overflowing.

And most of all, excited about having a whole week with nothing to do except read, play games, gaze at old ornaments, and contemplate life. The Christmas season, after all, confronts us with powerful questions. Is life really just about money and stuff, or is it about love? Is family a refuge and haven, or is work most important? And is there something beyond the daily grind, a question one can really only ask during those few days when the daily grind actually stops. One word that keeps popping through my mind is gratitude: gratitude for family, for the blessing of living in this amazing country, and for the blessings of a God who loved us enough to enter into this world with us as a tiny baby. So I need to ask this year: why did it take so long for me to feel this gratitude and get in the Christmas spirit? Now that I’m finally here, I want the peace and the joy to last all year.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

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I’ve written my syndicated column for ten years now–that’s ten years of Christmas columns, and at 3 on average per year, that’s a lot of Christmas. I thought I’d rerun some of my favourites from years back, because I really think the older ones are the best ones! Here’s one from 2003.

When I was in Canadian Tire a while ago I saw an absolutely stunning Christmas tree. It was decorated in silver bows and balls with purple accents. It was my ideal tree.

Such a tree, however, will never grace my living room. No matter how much I want a purple and silver one, I have too many other decorations that render a consistent colour scheme impossible. I have a family Christmas tree.

First comes the gold heart embossed with “Keith and Sheila, 1991” that we received at our wedding. Then there are all the Christmas decorations we made as children which our parents thoughtfully gave us our first Christmas together (were they trying to get rid of them, I wonder?). There’s the canvas stitched candy cane Keith made, and the decorated styrofoam balls I did. Other decorations full of childhood memories hang beside them, like the angel candle holders that were on my Baby Jesus birthday cake when I was six.

And now, of course, we have added our children’s decorations. At first they were fairly innocuous ones, like “Baby’s First Christmas”. They have since become more ambitious. One year the girls and I made dough Christmas shapes and then glued little pictures to them. Katie, who is living proof that you can survive your second year of life eating only dried play dough (believe me, it wasn’t my choice), actually left nibble marks in some as she tried to eat them, too, despite the salt content. Add the decorations the girls make at Sunday school out of little paper doilies, and there’s no room for those classy purple balls.

Our lives are very much like these Christmas trees. We spend so much effort trying to have the perfectly decorated life, with the right kids, the right jobs, and the right promotions. But it can be exhausting to live that way. Our work is never done. We’re always on the go, and when we do sit down it’s only to plan how to drive our kids to more lessons, run some more errands or throw on yet another load of laundry before we make dinner.

The family Christmas tree, with all its imperfections, is better because it is uniquely us. Anybody can have a perfectly purple Christmas tree. Not everyone can have the one decorated with your own white doily angels and pipe cleaner reindeer. Christmas anchors us and reminds us of whose we are and of what’s important. A sign at Majestic Dry Cleaners recently read, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there”. Many of us are stuck on some sideroad of endless errands and work because we need a road map to get us home, a map that can only come by slowing down and reflecting, if just for a little while. With the busyness of life, we often ignore our spiritual side, never taking time to think about life, death, parenting or our purpose on this earth. Christmas can be our roadmap, a time to take stock of our lives and consider if we’re heading in the right direction.

Whatever your spiritual background is, the challenge is the same: let’s take the time during the holidays to honour it. At my house this week, we’ll have a “Baby Jesus Birthday Cake” (chocolate, of course), to remind us that Christmas is when the all-powerful God became as helpless as a baby so he could live among us and die for us, so we could live forever with him. I don’t want that just to be my Christmas message; I want to live it through the rest of the year. But if I don’t take the chance now to see whether my daily life reflects my spiritual priorities, I may not have time once the daily grind starts anew.

I will gladly take my Baby Jesus birthday cake angels and little dough hearts over purple balls any day. That’s who I am, and who I want to be. Christmas is one of the few times of year when we can contemplate life without someone telling us to move on to the next task. Let’s make sure that this year, we take advantage of the opportunity.

Merry Christmas, everybody!