David:          We’re calling this visit The Hassle of the December holidays.

Karen:          I’m wondering if we need to explain that to our listeners. I don’t think so.

David:          No, they got it.

Intro:             Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:          We could though, Karen, explain that this is the first day of December. We’re doing this recording, and people won’t hear it for a couple of weeks. But we are just moving into the place where we’re saying, “Okay, the month has arrived.”

Karen:          How do we make this Christmas season the best one that we possibly can make?

David:          And that becomes a common question in almost everyone’s minds because December has a way of just taking off on its own. And whom! All of a sudden you wonder how did all these things end up on my desk if I put it that way?

Karen:          Well, and I think that this is a different year for many of us this Christmas season because of the long COVID durations that we’ve had.

David:          I’m sure you’re right.

Karen:          I’m not sure if we understand yet or have the analysis as far as what COVID has done to us nationally. I think we suspect certain things or have commentators giving their opinions, but I think there will be an analysis afterwards. And of course, this holy season, this Christmas season, comes still when we’re in the midst of COVID with a new variant rising. We’re not really sure what that’s going to do. But we’re sort of stuck in this place.  It’s not like we can move on as a nation from the COVID experience because so many people are still experiencing it. Dying from it. And so, we’re here we are. So, it’s a different…

David:          Our family has been very fortunate.

Karen:          Our family and friends have been very fortunate. But I think that puts the question of what this season should be or how can we make it the best that we can into a different light than from other years.

David:          I got out one of our old advent calendars from back in Chapel of the Air days and was just going through it to say, how did this work for people before? And I’m refreshing my memory. And one of the things that I looked at there was saying, “As you look at the season, decide what greeting you’re going to give to people.” Because it’s just common to say, Merry Christmas you know. But Merry Christmas doesn’t really communicate what is on my heart as far as the gospel is concerned.

So, it’s a – “Come up with a new one. And something that expresses who you really are. I worked on that for a while.

Karen:          Good for you.

David:          I tried different things, and I’d say them out loud. It didn’t sound very good. So, I finally decided on as I’ve come into this month and I practiced a couple of times before today that I would say instead of Merry Christmas, Joy to the World! And if it seemed appropriate, I would say, “The Lord is Come!” And I tried it, Karen. I tried one of the virtues.

Karen:          And so, what happened?

David:          Well, I said, you know, as I was leaving, I said, “Oh, by the way, joy to the world!” And you know what they said?

Karen:          Didn’t they really say ,”The Lord Has Come?”

David:          They said, “The Lord has come!” Yes. They finished it for me, which made me feel good.

Karen:          Oh, that’s lovely. What a lovely story.

David:          Yeah. And it kind of put a bond between myself and those given merchants. So, I thought they, well, they know the carols anyway, which is neat.

Karen:          So, what are you doing?

David:          I’m saying regularly now, joy to the world. The Lord has come.

Karen:          Okay.

David:          You know, I’m going to do it at the bank. I’m going to do it at the UPS. I’ll do it at the post office. You know, I’ll do it at the gas station.

Karen:          You need to take a little pad with you and write down the responses.

David:          I’ll remember. There’s no question about that. Another suggestion in that calendar from way back was to get a devotional and in the mail with our Christianity Today subscription there came the Gospel of Advent devotional readings from Christianity Today 2021.

Karen:          That’s lovely.

David:          And they’re a page each. I would say that with what I could do with a page, they’ve done quite a bit. So that gives me the opportunity to go back and read Advent. You know what the meaning is?

Karen:          Well, it’s coming. Isn’t it?

David:          It’s the coming of the Christ. And interestingly, it begins, strange enough, Advent does the season of coming with the second coming. So that first week of Advent is the second coming. And then we’ll get into it more and more as time goes on.

Karen:          In the liturgical churches that observed the church calendar, which means that there are special feast days and special times of remembrance or seasons on the church calendar. The church calendar, as I understand it, actually begins with the season of Advent.

David:          It’s the beginning of the church year.

Karen:          It doesn’t begin on January 1. What I understand about the season of Advent is that the first part of that season is a season given to self-recognizing. You say, where have I failed in my Christian journey? How do I need to do better? Are there areas where I need to confess that I made a promise to God, but I haven’t kept at. Whatever. A time of self-examination.

So, it’s more solemn than I think most people, when they hear the word Advent, think of Advent as being. But that comes out of this, as I said, the church calendar tradition. And we were in the liturgical churches for many years. And I appreciated the fact that there was this pause before Christmas, that the entire church, that was an Episcopal church, the entire denomination was participating in. But I liked the whole idea of getting ourselves ready to observe Christ’s birth in Christmas, but also his second coming, because it made it more replete. And then there was this self-consideration of what do I need to do to do better in my intents so that this next year, as I live my life with Christ, the rest of the church calendar will be better than the one behind me.

David:          One of the advantages of being older is that in time, you accumulate quite a number of Christmas books. We don’t have them all out this year because there’s some remodeling going on in the downstairs.

Karen:          But I can see them on the top shelf. I can’t reach them.  Because the little library is just filled with furniture. But that would be a wonderful suggestion for people. I usually take all those Christmas books down and I put them in a flat basket and put them in front of the fireplace on the coffee table. In fact, we had a woman who lived with us for many years. She was off the streets and had been very, very damaged.

David:          It has become very, very beautiful.

Karen:          You know, talk about redemption and grace, I think, of this woman.

David:          She’s like a daughter. Yeah.

Karen:          So, she came popping into the house before Christmas one year. She’s living in another state now. And she said, “Where are the Christmas books?” And so, I said, you know what? I don’t know what I did with them. We were reorganizing. So, she hunted them down and found that there are probably 20, 25 of them and pulled them all out and made sure they were on the table in front of the fireplace because that was her sign of Christmas coming. It was the time when we began to get the Christmas books out.

David:          Christmas books don’t have to be read just one time. I got one of my Christmas books out. The Day Christ Was Born. This is Jim Bishop. He was Catholic writer.

Karen:          He did a lot of the days.  I can’t remember.

David:          The day Christ died.

Karen:          The day Christ died.

David:          That was his huge, huge bestseller. He did the day Lincoln was shot.

Karen:          Oh, yeah. He did a whole series of books like that, didn’t he?

David:          Well, this is part of that. I don’t know how many more there were, but The Day Christ Was Born, which is not that big a book. I got it out and I started to read it and cared round me to tears.

Karen:          Oh, that’s very meaningful.

David:          It’s just a Christmas story and there’s not a lot about the Christmas story in scripture. So, what he writes, he has to use his imagination, but he does a very good job of it. And there are times as I read through it, I thought, “I’m not sure that’s how it happened.”

Karen:          Well, he’s filling in the narrative because the narrative is very direct. It doesn’t have a lot of information or details. So that’s a work of imagination, which is perfectly fine.

David:          Just a short feel here, okay? This is on page 45. So, he’s gotten into the story quite a bit by now.

In Rome, Caesar Augustus learned that many of his subjects were dishonest. He ruled the known world, but the amount of taxes was not commensurate with the number of subjects. He held a council in Rome and his advisors told Caesar that he could not levy an equitable tax until he had an accurate idea of the population of the several provinces. Caesar issued an imperial re-script ordering all subjects in the Winter Solstice to return to the cities of their fathers and there be counted. This of course would work hardship on millions of people and in a two-week period of migration would upset the economic balance. Men left their work to travel to distant cities. But it had to be done. The census would be taken. in many tongues and in places along the Rhine River, the Danube, in North Africa, Portugal, Syria, Belgium, Egypt, Palestine, and all along the North Mediterranean shore.

Many of the subject people chafed when the law was proclaimed. They said that Caesar was not a just king to do this to them. Even in a small town like Nazareth, where Caesar Augustus would not be known by name, the Jews said that it was not fair. Joseph sought the local tax merchant and asked if women in advanced pregnancy could be excused, and he was told that no one could be excused. Even the lame and the blind had to report to the cities of their fathers, and many would have to be carried on pallets. While you’re getting the feel of what they’re saying.

Karen:          Yeah, it’s a totally full, full picture of what could have been when this edict went out.

David:          Yeah, it’s beautiful. And Karen, he sees Mary as a young girl in her early teens. And Joseph, not all that much older, and he’s going back into the customs of the day and saying this is what normally would have happened. And we have a granddaughter who had just become a teenager, and I’m thinking, you know,

Karen:          She’s about the age that Mary was at that time.

David:          It could well have been.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          It just, the whole scene is just coming to me in a fresh, new, wonderful way. And it’s not scripture, but it’s beautifully done, and by a person who’s a believer. So, there’s so many books with this Christmas theme, and it’s worth reading them.

Karen:          To get back into that.

David:          That’s right.

Karen:          What’s the meaning of Christmas.

David:          Yeah, I think so.

Karen:          I had something interesting happen with me. We have a little stargazer. It’s a small one, not a large telescope. And I thought, we’d never use this. So, our bedroom is such that we have a narrow window that faces west. And when I’m sleeping in bed, I often wake up in the middle of the night. I can look at that slim window, and the moon may be passing now in front of that window, whereas when I went to sleep, it wasn’t passing. But then I realized I could see certain sets of stars. And so, I did a little research.

David:          You are an interesting person.

Karen:          It’s part of being a writer. You know, you’re just always researching. That’s half the fun of writing. In November and December, there are three bright planets that appear up in the sky all at once together. And they’re called Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus. There’s three bright dots low in the southwest about 30 minutes after sunset, and then they go across the sky.

Now, in December 6 and 8, the crescent moon passed right next to the three planets. Now, you want to talk about activity in the heavens. Most of this is stuff that we miss. But as I was researching this, I realized that so much of the Nativity Story…

David:          I wonder where you’re going. I always made the connection. Okay, there’s the three kings watching the stars.

Karen:          So much of the Nativity Story has to do with looking in the heavens.

David:          Yes, very much he does, yes.

Karen:          It’s just very… And of course, that’s the way people in those ancient times traversed the world. They measured their path by a system of having looked at the stars, and then they counted for the seasons, too, because the night sky changes according to the seasons.

So, here’s the well-known story that I want to go back to. “Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared in the sky. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, ‘Go and make a careful search for the child as soon as you find him, report to me so that I too may go and worship him.’ After they had heard the king, they went on their way and the star they had seen, this unusual star that brought them all the way from the east, went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed, and in coming to the house. They saw the child with his mother, Mary, and they worshipped him.” We know that story.

So, this is also part of seeing the stars at night. This is from Luke. “And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you. He is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you. You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel.”

Just think about being there that night. Praising God is…

David:          That’s better than the Wheaton College…

Karen:          …a concert.

David:          Christmas concert, which was wonderful.

Karen:          “Praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

And of course, the angels left and “…then they said, let’s go see the sign.” But you know that we don’t think of the night sky as being a part of the nativity story, but it’s very much a part of it. And I think that sometimes we, moderns, get so busy with what’s in front of us, our worksheets and our screens and our…

David:          …to do lists

Karen:          …that we forget the awe that those people felt when they looked up in the sky. And I think we can’t quite ever capture that again, but we can get something. And so maybe some of us need to go.

David:          Some years ago, Karen, I remember we went down to Adler Planetarium, and they showed the Star of Bethlehem.

Karen:          Yes, I remember that.

David:          They hadn’t figured out exactly what it was and who knows what it was.

Karen:          But they did account for the fact that there was an unusual appearance in the sky.

David:          They did a wonderful job.

Karen:          Wonderful job. Yeah.

David:          Wonderful job. Yeah. It prepares your heart for that season of wonder.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          Something beyond anyone’s imagination. God is coming into the world.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          It’s beautiful.

Karen:          So, what we’re saying to people is this, take time to say, “How do we make this the best season possible?” Not in all the rigmarole of gift giving and buying and decorating the home. And those are fine. But sometimes those things just sweep in and take over and we have lists, and we get stressed because we’re not getting everything done, we wanted to do. And, you know, you’re doing your shopping and wrapping gifts, food prepping. That’s not the true meaning of Christmas. And so, we’re saying to you, what would bring that meaning close to you again and take time now to decide what that would be and participate in it?

David:          I’m ready with my sentence. And I’m going to change, you said take time. I think it’s a better word. Make, making time to rediscover the wonder of the incarnation. We’ll take the hassle out of the December holidays. Now, is that just a neat sentence or do you think that really is true?

Karen:          No, I think that’s a truth. And I think that for those who are listening to us who may be doing this already, they know the benefit of that. But for those of our listeners who’ve kind of gotten caught up with all the things that go on.

David:          Let’s talk to somebody who’s already feeling the hassle of it all. I just think, I don’t care if I never live through another Christmas.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          Let’s talk to that person.

Karen:          Okay. I would just say to you, “Sit down, take time, let it all go, everything that you feel that is stressing you.”

David:          Yeah, in time, we’re not saying huge amounts of time.

Karen:          No.

David:          We’re just saying a small amount of time.

Karen:          And then you open your heart up to the Holy Spirit and you say, “How can I make this the best Christmas ever?” And I find whenever I pause and ask that question, there is always for me an internal kind of notification or reminder or a little nudge. And then when I pay attention to that nudge, consider it to be of the Holy Spirit. I’m always glad that I have.

David:          Yeah. Our ideas may not be what you come up with. You’ll probably come up with something.

Karen:          Much better.

David:          We’ve given you the start and you take it from there. And then I think God will take it from there.

Outro:          You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters, hosts@beforewego.show.

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