I am recalling the Christmas a few years ago when, a week or so before Christmas, Chandler unbeknownst to anyone in the family, wrapped up a DVD he found among Anne’s things and put it under the tree for her. And I also remember how surprised and relieved we all were on Christmas morning when, as the first gift of Christmas, Anne opened the Emergency Medical Technician training DVD 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 graduate 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 heart 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.