When does it feel like Christmas for you? Is it when you head over to Menards mid-September and see Christmas decorations and lights for sale, or maybe just after Thanksgiving when you and the family put up the tree.

What made it feel like Christmas for me has had to change. Formerly, I would have told you that the first time I had to shovel the driveway was when it finally started to feel like Christmas, or when my family and I would head to a nearby Christmas tree farm and cut down a blue spruce that took my dad hours to pick out. But now that Columbus is my home all of that has changed, and not in a bad way.

Now I have new traditions and markers in my calendar that make it feel like Christmas. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Eating way too much food at our High School and Middle School Advent dinners.
2. Trying to find that perfect White Elephant gift for our Sunday Night Christmas party.
3. Preparing to teach our discipleship groups from Luke’s Gospel.
4. Singing Christmas Carols with our college-age students.
5. Getting my annual tin of chocolate covered peanuts from Larry and Deetta Schrumpf. (Which my wife usually eats in less than two days)

I hope you have wonderful markers in your life this time of year, and I trust that many of them remind you of what Christmas is truly all about, the coming of our Lord and Savior and the hope we have of His return!

Kurt