Will your family give Jesus a Christmas present?

    Well, it’s that time of year again, the hectic time with all the hustle and bustle that comes with the Christmas season.
    We make lists, plan parties and make endless trips to shopping centers. We worry about whether we will find the perfect gift for that special person in our lives. We plan for everything; we think of everyone – or do we?
    It’s so easy to get caught up in all the worldly celebrations that sometimes we forget the “reason for the season.” Do we think about Jesus when we plan our Christmas celebrations or do we only remember him as we are getting ready for Mass on Christmas Day?
    If Christmas is the celebration of Jesus’ birth, shouldn’t the main focus be on him? After all, when you celebrate your birthday, aren’t you the guest of honor and the one who gets all of the attention?
    The church gives us an opportunity to focus our attention on Jesus through the season of Advent. Advent is a time to prepare our souls for the coming of Jesus. This is a time for us to find ways to deepen our relationship with him. How do you do this? To put it simply, the same way you deepen a relationship with a friend – you spend more time with that person.
    The way we spend time with Jesus is through prayer. The type of prayer that draws us to him is the one that comes from our heart. This prayer can be simple conversations with Jesus, thanking him for the blessings we have received, sharing with him our disappointments and heartaches, and praising him for being our God and savior.
    Advent is an opportunity to focus more on personal prayer, but it is also a good occasion to set aside time for family prayer. It is a good way to focus our children’s attention on Jesus so that they can recognize the true meaning of Christmas.
    When my children were very young, we created an Advent tradition to help us focus on Jesus. Since everyone in the family was going to receive a gift at Christmas, we decided that Jesus should also receive a gift. In the spirit of Matthew 25, which says that whatever we do for others, we do for Jesus, we prepared a gift for Jesus that consisted of “good deeds.”
    At the beginning of Advent, I would wrap a shoe box with birthday wrapping paper and slit an opening in the middle. Every night before going to bed, we would sit together and pray. Each one of us would thank Jesus for one good thing that had happened during the day, and we would ask Jesus to bless someone we knew that had a special need. Then we would discuss what “good deed” each of us could do the next day.
    Since the children were young, the deeds were simple. They would make an extra effort to be nice to a classmate, to be polite in class, to pick up their toys, etc. The following night, we would gather together for prayer, and each one of us would say the deed we had accomplished that day. I would write each one on a piece of paper, and each person would put his or her deed in the shoe box.
    By the time Christmas day arrived, we had been praying together and doing good deeds for more than 20 days. We had a box full of “good deeds” which we placed under the tree as a gift to Jesus.
    This Christmas give Jesus the gift of your time. Make time to pray.
    Judith Gutierrez is a parishioner of St. Clement of Rome Parish in Metairie. She may be reached at [email protected]