Giving Thanks for Christ Mass

Normally I wait til the day after Thanksgiving to set up the tree, but since I had made all my dishes ahead of time,  I had nothing to do on Thanksgiving but be hungrily waiting for the meal and giving Thanks. So I decided to get going on Christmas, as long as I had helpers lounging around as well.

The helpers seemed less enthused about setting up for Christmas so I was mostly on my own. I was anxious to see if the tree I had bought for half price at the end of last season which I had never unboxed actually would light up. We had entered the new Christmas revolution, and bought a prelit tree for the first time. This means you just hook 3 parts together and flip a switch and you have instant Christmas.

Of course it is never in actuality EVER as easy as it seems.  For one thing, I read the instructions about sliding the midsection down on the bottom section AFTER I noticed there was a subtle mark on both sections that were supposed to line up. And then of course, I could not pull the two pieces apart. This little detail must not have been too critical however, because an hour later, huffing and puffing from my labor over a task that should have taken two minutes, the tree did indeed light up. And it was beautiful. I sat in my rearranged living room and gazed at it happily.

I had only meant to do a little of my Christmas transforming, but one little decoration led to another, and pretty soon the only thing that looked like Thanksgiving was the dining room table. All about it stood Christmas.

Which in a sense is the way it should always be.

Christmas is supposed to be all about the wonder and joy of the Messiah entering the world- the bearer of forgiveness and salvation and reunion with God. There should be a concurrent roar of Thanksgiving... but sometimes gratitude gets buried by greed and scurrying, and stress over things that really don't matter but seem to matter very much when we are living them.

And Thanksgiving should at its core be about the manifold blessings of our Creator, who loved us so much that He sent His one and only son as an innocent baby into the world. Christmas! The world is harsh, particularly to innocence, and Jesus did not have a happy time of it. But He accomplished all that He was to accomplish,  Christ Mass.  The term Mass means dismissal, or mission. Jesus was dismissed, sent to be the Christ, the one who would draw the world back to God.

So maybe having my Christmas decorations surrounding my Thanksgiving is not such a bad thing. A Bible word search of "Thanks" and "Christ" together had eight verses that linked the two. Asherel wore a Santa hat as we walked the dogs. Maybe some people thought we were just mixed up, with the Christmas tree lighting the front window, and the crazy girl in a Santa hat while everyone else was celebrating Thanksgiving. But I think I may make it our new tradition.

1 Corinthians 10:15-17 (New International Version, ©2010)

¹⁵ I speak to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. ¹⁶ Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? ¹⁷ Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf.