"I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas"--Not Stacks of Dishes

"I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas,"--not stacks of dishes.

Stacks of them. Piles of them. All over the counter and table. Every day.

All during Christmas season.

And we dream of all sorts of Christmas gifts and glitter and glitz and trees and sparkle and tinsel

and snowflakes.

And instead the kids track in dirt and the woodstove dribbles ashes, and our rooms are a mess.

Every day, even at Christmas time--especially at Christmas time--

we have to clean up and wash dishes and cook meals and exercise patience!

We go Christmas shopping and bring home bags of Christmas surprises--

and then we have to unload the van and clean out the orange peels and candy wrappers and torn chip bags and slimy banana peels and wrinkled up advertisements and store papers and dirt.

And we pull out load after load of laundry--and clean out the treasures the boys had in their pockets!

And try to get the kids to finish their schoolwork before Christmas break.

You catch your son doing art class instead of spelling and vocabulary.

  Occasionally there is a special treat like doughnut balls,

with the youngest rolling them in sugar.

Other times we make do with quick hamburgers from homegrown beef or wild elk,

and homemade rolls we found in the fridge from who knows when. And oven fries.

I think the glitter and glitz and houses full of ornaments are for grandparents--and maybe our day is coming. 

Until then, we are thankful to have a few adornments safely on high little shelves--like this one in Carrie's room.

 I love her tasteful decorations out of a little bit of nothing.

Below is a tree she made out of a tomato cage and greenery.

  Sometimes you'd sorta like to just get away from it all--and stick your head in a feedsack like our goat managed to do one day!

But how did Christ come that first "Christmas"?

In our culture, Christmas is no longer just one fun day with a Christmas Eve tree-decorating time.

It's a whole over-commercialized season, and it's easy to over-expect and feel a constant sense of disappointment.

So this ordinary Mom during a very ordinary Christmas season full of farm chores and messes and dishes and cooking for a constantly hungry family (Timmy is going through a growing spurt and is almost ALWAYS hungry) is always on the lookout for inspiration in the ordinary and humdrum.

The inspiration of Christ coming as an ordinary baby to an ordinary mother wed to an ordinary husband in an ordinary little town in an ordinary countryside...

That ordinary couple traveled to another ordinary town and slept in an ordinary stable,

and the angels came to ordinary shepherds, and they all lived rather ordinary lives for the next 30 years.

And so Christ still loves to come to the ordinary.

He loves to visit ordinary mothers in the middle of their ordinary tasks of dishes and laundry and cleaning and ironing and wrapping Christmas gifts. 

(These little ornaments were made by our dear Aunt Irina. I wish I could have had a chance to watch how she made them.)

God loves to bring surprising opportunities in ordinary circumstances--like Andrew Street, missionary in a difficult foreign land, wrote in the latest Christmas Missionary Herald, about using your dinner table as a tool for sharing Christ with others. (How I appreciated that article!)

Jesus, come to Your ordinary mothers and fathers and children this year!

Surprise us under ordinary--and perhaps messy--circumstances!

"Be with us now--in the middle of our stacks of dishes, in the middle of the the dirt we've just swept up, in the middle of rushes to meet schedules, in the middle of various frustrations--
Be with us now--Emmanuel!"