December 10 Advent Devotion Written by John Burke

Trisha Huffman | December 10, 2015

Year-Round Christmas

            My father was the most unusual and eccentric man I ever knew. He was also a twelve- month-a-year Christmas person.

            My father was a disabled war veteran who graduated from college the same year I graduated from high school. So until then, he never had a well-paying job and was frequently unemployed. That is to say, we were poor.

            One year my mother was desperate for a new winter coat. Secretly, he began making weekly payments in January on a very nice dress winter coat. Early on Christmas Eve, he walked downtown, paid the coat off, and came home and put the box under the tree. I still remember how my mother burst into tears when she opened the box, never dreaming she would receive such a nice coat. He told her he had enjoyed the gift for an entire year.

            Another year, he decided to give my grandmother, his mother-in-law, a new rocking chair she had been admiring for a long time. My father was an orphan, and often told my mother he had married her in order to gain a mother-in-law. She was special to him, and we all lived together.

            He began in January paying on the chair. Again on Christmas Eve, he put on his coat and hat and walked five miles to the furniture store. (He walked everywhere he went if he could.) He paid off the chair and carried it back home, all five miles, with the unboxed rocking chair perched on his head. He told us later that when he got tired, he would just sit down and rock for a while.

            Upon arriving home, he walked in, handed my grandmother the chair, and with a big smile said; “Merry Christmas, Mom.” I’m sure it felt very special for an orphan to be able to say that, and my grandmother had tears in her eyes also.

            Maybe gift giving is too easy for many of us. Maybe Christmas comes too soon and ends too early. But never for my father.

Prayer: Lord, help us remember that when the Word became Flesh, it was not just a one-time thing. John 1:14 says, “The Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us.”