The thing we miss most about living overseas is celebrating Christmas with friends and family.
We miss singing carols around the piano, making gingerbread cookies, watching pageants at church, hanging lights on the tree, parties with family and friends, playing in the snow, and shopping for gifts. There’s so much to do for an American Christmas and so many traditions to keep.
In West Africa, our family Christmas looks quite different. We cut a branch from a thorn bush and use it as a makeshift Christmas tree. Harmattan winds blow sand—not snow—in our faces. Some years we invite our neighbors for a feast of roasted goat.
But there’s not much else to help us mark the season.
Harmattan winds blow sand—not snow—in our faces.
Our neighbors don’t celebrate the holiday. The town doesn’t decorate the streets. There are no lights to hang. No pianos to gather around. No parties to attend. No Christmas music on the radio. Nothing.
For the first time in years, we find ourselves in the U.S. this Christmas. We’re here long enough to enroll our son in kindergarten.
Recently, the kindergarten teacher sent us a note. “Your son is telling other kids that Santa Claus isn’t real,” her message said. “It’s disturbing the other children.”
What do you tell a kid who has only spent Christmas in a place where no one else celebrates it—who only knows it as the birth of the Savior? What do you tell him when all his school friends are saying, “If you don’t believe, then you won’t receive”?
The first Christmas took place over 2,000 years ago when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). God entered into our broken world and made a way for us to be with Him forever.
“Your son is telling other kids that Santa Claus isn’t real.”
Even our cultural beliefs about Santa Claus are based on the wonderful news of Christ. Saint Nicholas, who lived during the fourth century, followed Jesus’ teachings so passionately that he gave away all his inherited wealth and traveled around helping the poor and sick. He understood the great love and sacrifice God showed us by sending the greatest gift of all, the Messiah.
Believing in the Savior won’t put an extra present under your tree this year. But it will give you the gift of eternal life.
“Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household.” — Acts 16:31
If you don’t believe, then you won’t receive.
Standing in the middle of a Muslim cemetery in a desert oasis, a Frontiers worker gets a fresh take on the power of the Christmas promise.
This account comes from a long-term worker.
Main photo by Michal Huniewicz