11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. ~ Luke 2:11 (KJV)
By Bro. John L. Cash
A couple of weeks ago, Susan’s mom wasn’t feeling well. Susan made a quick trip to Little Rock to help take care of her, and was there for a week. When she called me before returning to Mississippi, she told me that she had had wonderful visit in Arkansas. But she confessed to me that she was feeling stressed because she had fallen a week behind on her preparations for Christmas.
I told her not to worry because we would work on the situation together and get it completed a little at a time. I told her that our son Seth had already set up the Christmas tree, and it would be ready for us to decorate when she got home. We were that much ahead. Then I left the house for a day at the office.
Imagine my dismay when I arrived back home that afternoon to find that our two Siamese kittens, Eleanor Roosevelt and MacArthur McBeath, had completely wrecked our Christmas tree. Evidently they had spent the day climbing it and jumping from the branches. I can’t say I blame them. The Lord created cats to climb trees. They probably thought Santa had brought them a new jungle-gym.
I texted Susan to tell her the bad news. I told her we probably wouldn’t be able to have a tree this year unless we hired a full-time Nazi-war-criminal with a stun-gun to guard the thing. Susan said, “Don’t worry about it. 
We’ll figure something out.”
I was delighted by my wife’s optimism and ingenuity. When she got home she set up a little wooden tree that a friend had made. It was crafted from recycled pallet-wood. She bought two strings of those classic-big-bulb-Charlie-Brown-Christmas-tree lights, and a lighted star to go on top of our little tree. She set the whole thing on a table, covered the base with burlap, dimmed the lights, and plugged it in. We stepped back to admire her handiwork.
And then it happened. “All of the endorphins fired,” (as Susan is fond of saying). The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I felt a chill. Once again, God had entered History to save Mankind. And once again, it was Christmas.
So, just a word of advice, from our house to yours: Stop trying to have a perfect holiday this year. It’s just never going to happen in this fallen world. Go with the flow, and look for God’s blessings as you bend with the breeze. You’ll never have a perfect Season, but you can have a merry one—even if it is a Siamese Christmas.
Dr. John L. Cash is the “Country Preacher Dad.” He was raised in Stuttgart, Arkansas, and has spent the last 30 years being a country preacher in the piney woods five miles south of the little town of Hickory, Mississippi. (On week days has a desk-job at a public school, where he used to teach Latin on closed-circuit-television.) He and his lovely wife, Susan, live in the parsonage next door to the Antioch Christian Church (where the kittens are sniffing the tree, but not attacking it.) Their kids include Spencer (age 24), his wife Madeline (age 24), and Seth (age 21). You can send him a note at brotherjohn@ilovechurchcamp.com.
