Christmast Expectation

My readers are mostly smarter than I am, so perhaps you've already figured all this stuff out...

So I realized over Christmas what it was as a kid that at least in part made Christmas such a magical time. There was a sense in my imagination that something that was waiting for me on Christmas morning could radically alter my world for the good. My world was simple and small. It did not take much to turn it in significantly different and wonderfully better directions: the right toy car, a video game system (never did get that Atari that was at the top of my list for several years), a new bike, etc.

So on the days leading up to Christmas I lived in expectation and hope and anticipation of how my Christmas morning loot would radically alter my life. And I can't remember ever being disappointed as a kid...even when I didn't get my Atari.

I remember the first Christmas I did feel disappointed about Christmas morning. I was in Junior High, that awkward time of transition and change where my head and ears were grossly disproportionate to the rest of my body. My world was getting bigger (like my ears) and more complex. Packages and gifts weren't going to change it nearly as easily. I couldn't articulate this at the time, I simply realized that my expectations of Christmas had be ratcheted down.

I'm not sure what to make of all this apart from observing it and perhaps stating that it's not a bad thing as a kid to have a small world that is easily made much more fun. In the Scriptures Paul states that when he was a child he talked and reasoned as a child and then when he became a man he put childish things behind him. This is not to say that childish things are inappropriate for a child. Just not for a grown man or woman.

So it would be a little messed up for me as a thirty-three year old to have that same giddy expectation that Christmas morning's presents would change everything. But now I get to enjoy watching my kids have that hope. And I rest in the bigger reality of One Christmas gift that started it all that really did change things once and forever.

No, not the Atari.