But I'm not here to talk about Christmas lights. Well, not electric ones anyway. The moon was a fingernail tonight - a silver crescent softened by the thin cloud layer setting behind the mountains to the west. All night, in between each house, I could look up and see the moon hanging there quietly.
While the moon is as regular and every day as nearly anything else, it was still the best Christmas light tonight that I saw.
Which got me thinking...isn't that really what Christmas is? God used a regular, every day girl to mother His Son, a regular every day carpenter to be Jesus' step dad, regular every day shepherds to be the first to tell about Christ, regular every day feeding troughs to hold Jesus. There was nothing classy, fancy, or modern about His birth. It was as low class of birth as you could get.
And yet...no birth before or since has been like it. No baby has ever held as much promise and Jesus did in His tiny wrinkled hands. No mother before or since has ever kissed the face of God when they kissed their baby boy. No baby has ever grown into the Son of Man, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The Christmas birth? It was one of a kind for all time.
And yet it was filled with ordinary, every day people. Maybe that's the true meaning of Christmas...it's not about the gifts and toys, about the lights or noise. It's about God Himself, the great I AM, humbling Himself and becoming an ordinary human. Truth be told, Christmas is about as anti-climatic as you can get. It's worse than looking at the moon instead of at the once a year light displays. It's Beauty veiling itself in the mundane, Deity clothing itself in flesh, Light dimming its face so that the most boring of people could see God face to face.
It's when you get to the rest of the story - Jesus' life, death, and resurrection - that's when Christmas goes from being ordinary and anti-climatic to being the beginning of the greatest story ever told. The best part of the story? It's true.
So the next time that you see the crescent moon hanging in the sky...I hope you think of how ordinary it is. And how extraordinary and incredible that first Christmas was because of the rest of the story.
Merry Christmas!