When February needs Christmas Carols.
I don’t know what your place is like in February, but mine is all about routines.
Old routines swing back into place after the long Summer Holiday (Australia has it’s long school holiday break over Christmas). Dance classes are up and running, so are swimming lessons. School is back, and with it the mandatory homework and study schedules etc.
We find our old rhythms of pick ups and drop offs and meal times and weekends. But there are new routines too. Subtle changes from last year. The family schedule shifts slightly as the children grow up. And, of course, there is the tendency to take on new ideas and resolutions at this time of year.
February becomes a strange flurry of comfort and re-adjustment and, strangely enough, it’s within this space that I find myself thinking about Christmas.
Not about the twinkling lights. Or even about packing up the decorations (this year I took down my Christmas decorations before the New Year!). But I get thinking again about that busy, bustling Inn, which is strange because it’s usually in December that someone, somewhere, will remind us how crowded Bethlehem was.
They will paint the picture of the masses of people, the bulging belly of Mary and the stubborn inn-keeper insisting that – although he was really very sorry – there was no more space. And then, whoever it is that tells this version of the tale, will prompt us to consider our own lives and whether the hustle and hurry of Christmas celebrations are making us leave Jesus out in the cold once more.
But you know what? I don’t think I need that reminder in December. I need to think about it in February; when routines are being formed, when values are proven by the commitments we make, when new habits are chosen and old ones renewed.
It’s February when we chose, deliberately and not, how to live. February when we make unconscious decisions that fill up the space in our lives leaving very little left for our Saviour.
So this February I choose to stop.
I’ll dig up a carol: No Room In the Inn by the Donut Man (It’s song #8 on the Donut Forget Bible Songs Volume 2) and strive to keep Christmas in every routine that February locks in place.