MERRY CHRISTMAS ::

On Christmas Day last year, my husband received a call from a student. After a quick "Merry Christmas" Bill excitedly exclaimed, "The new bridge has opened! Let's go drive over it." My husband tried to decline, politely explaining, "Christmas is a special day that we spend with our families. We are preparing Christmas dinner." Bill replied, "Well, just eat it quickly and let's go."

In Canada, engulfed by Christmas commercialism, it's hard to imagine a country where Christmas is not celebrated. We don't have to imagine it. Christmas is not a national holiday in our country. While we are opening gifts and baking turkey, our neighbours are at work and their children are in school. Apart from the Christians who make Christmas an opportunity to witness, Christmas goes by largely unnoticed. While the local malls are not filled with Christmas shoppers, our preparations are still an adventure.

My friend and I went out yesterday to prepare for our Christmas baking. We thought we were crazy buying the only available icing sugar- 30 pounds. Where we live, people shop daily so that their food is fresh- they do not buy in bulk. With our full carts and unusual purchases we were getting the "What are those crazy foreigners doing?" looks. One lady even approached us and asked us what we were going to make with butter, a product that few people buy.

You'd never imagine Christmas lights to be a hard item to buy. It wasn't until we located boxed ornaments that we realized we had no lights. Rather than one of us travelling across the city to a small-scale version of "Costco" we decided to go as a family to a hardware store that carries imported products. Picturing a store like Canadian Tire, we figured that finding Christmas lights would be a cinch. We were wrong. After a few hours of searching stores in our area we gave up and I went alone to the store that we had originally avoided.

Within an hour of my return we were down from three strings of lights to one. One string was defective when purchased and the second string didn't survive long in a home of three excited kids and two tired parents. Our partially lit tree was finally in place 8 hours after we took it out of the box.

Just as it's hard to find Christmas lights, in a city of 8 million people with only small gatherings of believers, it's hard to find the True Light. Please pray with us, as we host Christmas parties and attempt to talk with neighbours, that we will have opportunities to share the true meaning of Christmas