I’m dreaming of a Diapered Christmas

This Christmas season has been marked by a big change – we are finally moving everything up to Ithaca. Yet, I have found that when I go to share my holiday news with family and friends, they interpret the excitement in my voice to be news of a different sort.

“You’re pregnant,” they breathlessly offer.

My face drops a little and my mind is brought to the extraordinary amount of time I have spent in an OB-GYN office recently, surrounded by an army of pregnant women

“No, I'm not preganat yet...Bill is moving up to Ithaca…we are finally getting to live together again!” I manage, a little less excited than before.

“Oh,” they respond their smiles a little less full.

Filled up to my eyeballs in boxes and wondering where the heck my life is going, I have started getting the cards full of holiday cheer. Card after card shows the smiling faces of many of the single wedding guests at my wedding. Only they are not single anymore. Most of them have found that special someone, got married and now have one, some even two little bundles of Christmas joy. I was the person who fell right outta my graduation robes and right into my wedding dress. Literally. The day after graduation, six and a half years ago, I got married. And now I find that I am sitting in a half packed apartment, my student status restored, whining the ears off my dear husband. While so much has changed, I still remain an overgrown kid. As I enter the last year of my twenties, I can still be found watching the Disney channel, only without a mini-me.

Yet, there are children in America and all over the world, living in a shelter no sturdier than a packing box, wondering why nobody wants them. There are people who are packing up boxes with nowhere to go. Christmas, more than any other time of the year, is a time of joy and babies too. But the holy infant so tender and mild was born in a manger. He was rejected by the world around him even at the moment of his birth. Yet, he came to bring good news to the world – the good news of love and everlasting life. A message that he sealed in his blood. A message that we are called to pass on. We are invited to the lonely place where the King of Glory was born, called to open our eyes and see the children around us – young and old – and embrace them with love and wonder as we greet again the newborn king.

May God Bless You and Your families during this Advent and Christmastime!!!