As a child, my favorite part of waking up on Christmas morning was the first waking realization that it was Christmas, which was the best day of the year, even in our nonchristian family.  

Here in our part of Oregon, the snow is melting off as quickly as it came. But we had about ten days in the middle when it was a winter wonderland—making December 2008 our snowiest month since January 1950, four years before I was born.

Usually here in my part of Oregon there are more mighty downpours than great snows. But my brother Lance and I, who've lived here all our lives, were just agreeing that this is the most snow we've seen since 1968, forty years ago.

In Christ’s day, shepherds stood on the bottom rung of the Palestinian social ladder. They shared the same unenviable status as tax collectors and dung sweepers.

This was our first Christmas with family numbered in double digits. Nanci and I are deeply grateful for our wonderful daughters, our awesome sons-in-law and our four priceless grandsons. Including Jack, little Santa.  

This photo is of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Tegel prison, prior to his move to the notorious concentration camp of Buchenwald. Though visits weren’t frequent or long, at Tegel his parents and his fiancé Maria were sometimes allowed to bring him books, such as the one in his hand.

Christmas is coming. We live our lives between the first Christmas and the second. We look back to that first Christmas and the life of Jesus on the earth for some 33 years—but we look forward to the Christmas in which the resurrected Christ will return and we, his resurrected people, will live with him forever on the New Earth. And right when we think “It doesn’t get any better than this”....it will!