Snowflakes drift gently outside and I wear a warm sweater and corduroys as I listen to Christmas music. How different from Christmas in Nigeria, and how very different from that first Christmas in Bethlehem.
The weather would have been cold and dry, with a dusty wind blowing. Instead of balsam fir and cinnamon, the holy family would have had the smell of hay and manure and animals in their nostrils. Instead of carols and bells, the bleating of goats, the cries of labor, and the soft squalling of a newborn baby. No home with candles burning and the happy faces of family and friends and the tastes of too many delicious foods; instead the overcrowded houses and barns, smokey with lamps and cooking fires.
In many ways that first Christmas resembles Christmas in Nigeria more than the cozy celebration we have made of it. In many ways, a spare and weary Christmas highlights better that Greatest Gift ever given, the Gift wrapped in swaddling clothes, surrounded by controversy, gazed upon by wondering faces of shepherds and livestock.
God bless you and have a Merry Christmas!
