I have a new policy about this holiday season…very new; in fact, it only began yesterday.  I have decided to do my best to be my most mindful about the difference between celebrating the event that beget the holiday — the coming of the Christ to our world of human flesh as the baby Jesus — and the times I am celebrating the secular holiday that has over taken the remembrance of the sacred event.

In honor of the first, may I wish you a blessed feast of the Nativity.  I hope that you are, as I am, preparing now to go and worship with your chosen community of faith, if they haven’t cancelled their Sunday services.  And even if you are not heading out to worship this morning, I invite you to remember that today is first and foremost a holy day and not a holiday and I share with you an interesting perspective from commentator Frederick Schmidt on the Patheos blog.

In honor of the second, I wish for all of you a very Merry Christmas, full of everything that you wish for, whatever that may be.  I personally will celebrate with too many cookies and some amazing coffeecake.

Whatever you celebrate today, even if it is just another day when the sun rises and the world spins, I hope for you that you do it with your full heart and with the knowledge that hope still abides in the world, even if we cannot see it or feel it at this very moment.   Whether or not you believe that last night, we remembered the moment when God became flesh, or when Santa arrived to spread joy and prosperity, or you remember the last campaign of Antiochus by lighting the fifth candle in your menorah, I invite you to believe…believe in hope, believe in love, believe in the possibility that is yours as long as you have life and breath.