ramblings |

Christmas came late for me this year. Usually around 2 months before Christmas, I’d have felt the change in the wind. The festive mood made up of synthesizer-made Christmas carols, the increase in population (seriously, where did all those people come from? Where were they the rest of the year?), Christmas light-ups and fake snow, I’d barely contain my excitement thinking what Christmas gifts to get for friends. I love that shopping rush and also that self-imposed headache getting prezzies for people!

This year I’m spending my first Christmas as Mrs Bushy H., yet I still have absolutely no inkling of what it’s gonna be like. We are so busy, Christmas just seem so far away to really start a conversation on. There are always more immediate matters to attend to. Is this really what being ‘grown-up’ amount to? We have no time to really think about what Christmas is all about and what traditions passed down the generations mean? I just read a post from my favourite blog Under the Sycamore, really, everyone should read it. It’s about what Ashley, the mind behind the blog, wants to teach her children to celebrate the meaning of Christmas and to acquire the gift of giving by showing them by her own examples and getting them to learn them by their own actions. I always want to start my own family traditions and reading her blogs have given me the inspiration to not only create traditions, but also give meanings to them. I’m worried that, if I don’t have time to think about these things now and practise them through my own actions, what kind of example would I be giving my future kids? I’m worried that pure everyday slothfulness will get in the way of imparting precious values during their short impressionable growing years. I’m worried commercialism will get to them first, simply though the gaps of our busy lifestyle. It will be my greatest nightmare when my future kid ask me when is Santa Claus coming.

I am brought back to this one day during my childhood in Sunday School while I’m doing this post. I dreaded Sunday School when i was young because I was shy and joined the church later than the other kids in Sunday School whose parents had been there even before they were born. It was hard for me to make friends and even harder for me to participate in all those active extrovert stuff in class in front of people I know but don’t talk much to. I had given my fair share of excuses not to attend Sunday School, I’d rather sit in the adult Mandarin congregation with my mum. So imagine if on that one day I missed Sunday School, I would had missed the teacher telling us the Christmas story and drilling over and over again into my young mind that, Jesus is the reason for the season, Jesus is the reason for the season. Few years later, I would see that statement outside the departmental store CK Tang and I smiled to myself that the big ‘secret’ is out and people was then reading it across the massive banner. And every year during the Christmas season, I’d remember that – Jesus is the reason for the season.

I hope, in the future, our kids would know that simple truth and do more than what little I’m doing… mostly what I’m NOT doing. If He gave His Life for us, what can we give to other people who needs more to carry on His legacy?

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That said, it is now my guilty pleasure to show you how I would also dream of a white Christmas every year, but never gets it. This is the way I’m getting myself excited about those imaginary ‘chestnuts roasting on an open fire’ and that wintry honeymoon not so far away after Christmas.