Four years ago, the first gift to be opened on Christmas was in some ways the greatest, and the most sought after. It was probably the simplest gift as well. It didn’t take any time to shop for or any money to purchase. Our son, Chandler, then 7, had found a CD in his big sister’s room, and on his own initiative and without anyone’s knowledge, he wrapped it up for her for Christmas, and put it under the tree. When he insisted that she open it first, we assumed it was something he had made for her in school.

So when Anne unwrapped the first gift of Christmas, 2006, we were all both stunned and relieved to find the Emergency Medical Technician training DVD that she had been desperately looking for ever since Chandler turned it into a Christmas present. The loss was holding up her timeline for applying to medical school, and we all had been recruited to search for it. Chandler had simply found it first and decided it would make a good Christmas gift. It was certainly something she wanted; that much was true.

As you might imagine, upon opening her “gift,” Anne experienced a strong desire to both strangle Chandler and love him at the same time. Here he had wrapped up something she already had, made her suffer over the loss of it, and then gave it back to her as a gift — the gift part being the only thing he was really conscious about.

It occurs to me that this would be a foolproof way of giving someone what you know they will want for Christmas. Take away something they value, and then give it back for Christmas. Sounds like a dirty trick, but in some ways, this is just what God has done with us. He took away from the human race, that which was its most valuable possession — complete and open communication with God himself — and left us with a big hole in our hearts instead. And though we brought this on ourselves through disobedience, he provided a way he could reestablish that communication by sending Christ to us — his coming, of course, being the primary event we celebrate at Christmas.

So we lost our relationship with God and ever since we have been searching for what we once had, and on Christmas morning, we symbolically find it again in the coming of Christ — the first gift. Yes, the first gift of Christmas will always be Jesus.