Just a few personal notes about a wonderful Christmas. This year, because Christmas fell on the Lord’s Day, we had to spread our normal activities out over a couple days, in order to make room for two worship services within eighteen hours. We normally have a Christmas Eve service, which we did this year, but we then had our regular Lord’s Day service this morning pushed back an hour.
We normally have a Christmas brunch in the morning, and a big Christmas dinner late in the afternoon of Christmas Day. When it comes to putting on our feasts, my wife is Incredible Woman, but she is mortal — and to have our formal brunch, presents, getting ready for church, worship, returning home, and putting on a formal dinner for 25 people after church would be enough for me to get a visit from the elders. So we spread it out over two days. Christmas this year was too big for one day. Christmas is a good reminder of why celebrating the Lord’s Day weekly with a sabbath dinner is so important — it keeps you in shape. I cannot honor my wife highly enough — she is a high octane celebratory sabbatarian. Although we are having a great number of people over in about an hour, it is about the same number that we have every week as we mark the weekly Easter, the Lord’s Day. I cannot comprehend how she does it. She is one of the central reasons so many wonderful things are happening.
So we had our brunch Saturday morning, with all our kids and grandkids, and some friends for company. We had oven omelet, sausages, cinnamon pull-apart, orange rolls, fruit, and coffee and juice, and a lot of laughter. We prepared for the Christmas Eve service (a joint service with Trinity Reformed at 5 p.m.), and then after the service all the family converged on our house again for opening the family gifts. A few years ago, the grandkids developed a tradition of sneaking up on our house for any Christmas celebration decked out in funny hats. While they approach the house they sing, for some reason, a song out of Pirates of Penzance (“with cat-like tread”). This year a goodly number of the hats were from the Council of Nicea because the Merkle clan every year puts on a play with the other side of their family, and this year that play involved St. Nicolas confronting Arius at that great council. So the hats of the bishops did double duty. We had a wonderful time exchanging gifts. The Wilson branch of the kids stayed over night with us, so we had a blast this morning watching kids handling abundance and the kindness of their parents. We then got ready for church (again a joint service with Trinity), and worshipped our Father and God, in the name of Jesus, and in the power of the Holy Spirit — and we gladly served Him from whom all blessings flow. As I write this, we are about to sit down at our Christmas feast with my parents, my brother and his family, all our children and children’s children. God is the God of the covenant, and Jesus came to earth to keep the promise to Abraham, so that all the families of the earth would be blessed. Our families gathered here feel enormously blessed, and yet we are just one drop in the ocean of blessing that God has prepared for this world. May God be eternally praised, and merry Christmas.