A mom rediscovers the spirit of Christmas from her 3-year-old's childlike faith.
By Angela Klein

Last Christmas, I began the joyful holiday season feeling like a Scrooge. Maybe I felt that way because I spent too much time worrying about what to get everyone on my list. Maybe it was because once I decided what to buy them and to go shopping, my kids (both under three) didn't have the patience to shop. And they both made their feelings quite clear to everyone in the store.

And the thought of decorating for the holidays? It sounded like too much work. As I drove around my neighborhood looking at everyone else's decorations, I wondered: What does a giant inflatable mouse on the front lawn have to do with Christmas anyway? The real meaning of Christmas—the story of the birth of Jesus—was getting harder and harder to find. To my dismay, I was beginning to view Christmas as little more than a gaudy, stressful holiday.

I desperately wanted to pull out of my bad attitude. I really wanted my kids to understand that Christmas is about Jesus, about God coming to us. But even that was stressing me out. I wasn't sure how to explain to my eldest daughter Grace that Jesus, the baby in the manger, is the Son of God who has always existed. How did I explain to her that he's alive now, but we can't see him because he's in heaven? These are complicated, abstract ideas for someone pushing three.

One afternoon, as I was putting her down for a nap, she was overly tired and whiny. So I darkened the room and decided to tell her a story. I started by telling her about some shepherds out on a cold, dark night tending their sheep. Grace grew very still as I next described the scene of an angel showing up. I told her how the angel announced the good news that God had come to us to rescue us from our sin just as he had always promised. And the angel told the shepherds our Savior was a little baby, and they could find him in a stable lying in a manger.

"And then suddenly," I exclaimed, "the shepherds looked in the sky, and do you know what they saw?"

"What?" she asked, her eyes huge and her mouth wide open. "What did they see?"

I told her the sky was filled with angels praising God! I finished the story with the shepherds running to the stable to see Jesus. She exclaimed, "Mommy, I want to go to that stable, too!"

I smiled at what a cute thing that was to say, but she persisted, "When can we go to that stable? After my nap can we go?"

Every day she asked for more stories about the stable. We talked about Jesus having a manger for a bed because no one had room for him to stay. I shared about the kings who traveled from the other end of the world to come and worship him and bring him presents. I discovered she wasn't overly concerned with complicated theological ideas or the cosmic drama behind the scenes. She simply responded the same way every day: "I really want to go to that stable!"

Maybe that's what it means to have the faith of a child, because even the chief priests and scribes in Matthew 2 didn't run to the stable when they heard about the birth of Jesus. And they were supposed to be waiting for his arrival.

I didn't feel like such a Scrooge anymore. The words of familiar Christmas carols were new and meaningful to me. I still had my shopping list and decorating to do. But my daughter had taught me that in spite of all the hustle and bustle and festivities, I could find the real spirit of Christmas by going to worship at the stable.

Angela Klein lives with her husband and two children in Gilbert, Arizona. She was previously involved in a MOPS group at her church. This article first appeared in the November/December 2007 issue of MomSense. Used by permission of MOPS International, Denver, Colorado 80231.