I first jotted down this story the day after Christmas in 2011. Wow, fourteen years ago. In previous generations, forgotten letters and scribblings would have been discovered in hidden notebooks and boxes stacked in the attic. Today? It is a chance encounter on your hard drive while browsing through a list of files.
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What sort of Christmas would you like? For most of my adult life I wanted to have a Christmas that you would find depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting, or one which would fit nicely into a Thomas Kinkade home. You get the picture? Fireplace, cozy den, friends and family, nice food, a Christmas tree and modest decorations, with snow falling outside the pane glass window, and a steaming hot cup of chocolate milk (or maybe Coca-Cola in a 10 ounce bottle).
Teri (my wife) and I hit it off well in pursuit of the perfect Christmas. Being married in mid-December, we hopped on a train and headed to Vermont. It was, to be quite frank, White Christmas. We got off the train at this classic wood frame railroad station in a lazy, heavy snow fall. We were picked up by the innkeeper and spent the next several days in the most perfect Christmas environment you can imagine (and being passionately in love may have had something to do with it ). I can still picture the place and the people (and the resident basset hound), taste the wonderful food (!!!) and smell the fire in the den. …. and there was this guy who could sing opera.
For the next couple years our Christmases were a blend of travel between Teri’s family (being the only child I did not have much else to consider). To be quite frank, I can hardly remember anything from those times. But I do recall the house we lived in. It was an ancient farmhouse in constant remodel mode, but it had its charm, particularly the kitchen. Teri did a marvelous job of making this old house into a Christmas paradise. Life was simple then, just her and me and my parents next door. We did not have to go to a lot of effort to make ourselves happy.
Then came the kids and, as you can guess, the attainment of the ideal Christmas began to elude us. Not that kids have their special moments. I especially liked it when they had no idea what Christmas was about. They would open their gifts on Christmas morning and spend the rest of the Christmas day playing with the wrapping paper, the ribbons and boxes! It fascinated me how our Tupperware cabinet was the play center!
But Christmas was complicated by all those “little things” that attend family life. It is not the kids, necessarily, but everything that surrounds them. Being musically inclined, we were almost always involved with Christmas music. Church and school had their activities. Add to that one birthday and wedding anniversary, it was often difficult to fit in Christmas.
Means
And then there were the finances. We were an “average” family and like most families we discovered early on that we did not always budget our Christmas buying. So we “celebrated” Christmas until March or April. That made Christmas very unenjoyable for me because I paid the bills. As a devout Christian I began to deeply struggle with the holiday that held so much meaning yet had been deflected by materialism and financial difficulty. I began to rethink Christmas and would spend the next several years trying to turn it around.
One important step was returning to the tried and true “Christmas Fund”. Growing up as a kid the banks in town promoted Christmas Funds and parents often used these funds to instill in their children the concept of saving. What helped us rediscover the Christmas Fund was our bank providing graduated certificates of deposit (CDs). With this arrangement, I could contribute an amount monthly. The CD matured in mid-December. I used it primarily to pay off property taxes, but discovered that by rounding up $30-50 I would have plenty on hand for Christmas. As Christmas approached I could announce to everyone about what we could spend for Christmas. It was no longer a mystery. I can’t tell you how excited I was when we went through a Christmas knowing how much we could spend and actually celebrate it debt-free.
Place
The next big thing that happened for us was a consequence of our house ( we had since moved into a large home ). It lent itself to having room for three Christmas trees! We had a traditional living room with a fireplace, plus a large den. The house was perfect for Christmas. We had a lot of fun getting the trees and Teri and the kids were magicians when it came to decorating. We abstained from the gaudy display of lights outside the house, but we had a few strings hung out. Christmas began to revolve more around family traditions, pleasant things to see, smell and taste – and friends.
Time
Teri and I both suffered from procrastination and I personally stopped feeling guilty about sending stuff late for Christmas decades ago. For me, it is the Twelve Days of Christmas, known as Christmastide. I thought it was ridiculous how we concentrated our shopping, expenditures and postage service around December 25th. For centuries, people who couldn’t afford much of anything successfully arranged to visit each other and feast and drink for twelve days. What’s the rush? Wow, what a blessing it was for me to realize that if something came up that disrupted my timetable, I could relax and not worry about it. Send it the day AFTER Christmas! So what if someone got a Christmas gift the day before Epiphany.
Simplicity
But what alluded us for years was the simplicity of Christmas. It often disappointed me how we spent so much money on ourselves for Christmas. Children, especially, were surrounded by a culture that lavished on them countless gifts. And adults often defined “generosity” in terms of the small gifts you could pony-up for the office. Why not be generous all year round? Why not be content with one special gift rather than six? Why not remember the real purpose of Christmas?
It was much easier when kids were older. For the first time in roughly 25 years, Teri and I celebrated a Christmas where we each, as a family, agreed to buy only one gift for one other family member. Wow! What a blessing. The gifts were well-thought-out. They were not lavish. This past Christmas was the best ever. It was still a busy time, but a good kind of busy-ness. We have since exchanged our home in Missouri for a modest townhouse in Alaska. Most of our Christmases are now white. Christmas lights are modest. But Juneau-ites often leave their lights out for months because our nights are long. It sort of says “Hey world. We may have long nights, but it is warm inside and we are content!”. Because Juneau is small and isolated, we often read about the shopping madness down south as if it is an episode from Twilight Zone.
Suggestions
I hope all our Christmases are simple – and special. Suggestions?
- Save for Christmas. Don’t ever go into debt for Christmas. Remember this verse from the Bible – “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” Be realistic and be content.
- Focus on the senses: sight, sound, smell and taste.
- Have friends over
- Insist that Christmas is not just a day, but a “tide” and, for that matter, a “season”. Don’t let this special time of year be submerged in the tyranny of the urgent.
- As a family, commit yourselves to buying one thing for one person. In regards to kids, one suggestion is to consider special gifts throughout the year. When your son is preparing for Little League, have a specially wrapped package be a ball glove, a bat, or baseball shoes. Have attached a card that wishes him the best of success. When your wife needs encouragement, consider a bouquet of flowers with something she really needs.
- Give older adults nothing – but instead give in their name. We have been doing that through the World Vision gift catalog. Consider giving around a theme such as a farm. I gave a goat, chickens and cattle one year. This past year the theme has revolved around clean water.
It is my prayer and hope that having read this story, you can have success in discovering a perfect Christmas.
… the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord
Romans 6:23
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
Philippians 2:6,7
© Copyright 2025 to Eric Niewoehner