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This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

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December 23, 2022 | Leave a Comment

Happy Christmas Eve Eve

I’ve been wishing a “Happy Christmas Eve Eve” since long before Phoebe made it famous on Friends.

Christmas Eve Eve was a real thing in my house growing up. Christmas Day, even Christmas Eve, weren’t enough to contain what was the biggest event in our year. We started prepping for it in the springtime, planning gifts, making lists, and dreaming of the thrill. The year that my sister sewed me a life-sized doll? She started it on Valentine’s Day. Really.

We needed more than a day or even two to feel that sense of expectation. By Christmas Eve Eve, we were buzzing.

As real as the sense of expectation, though, was the sense of disappointment that descended by mid-morning on Christmas Day. Gifts opened, breakfast eaten, musical still playing on repeat for the seventy-sixth time, there was nothing more but to pick through the piles of opened gifts and wonder what came next.

What we celebrated was a holiday, not a holy day. It was an event on the calendar for giving and getting stuff that was supposed to signify the love we felt for each other in ways that our poor, emotionally grifting family couldn’t otherwise express.

I suspect it’s the same for many, but the gifts can’t fill a space intended for the manger. The food can’t fill empty hopes.

Christmas is, was and always will be a holy day if it is anything. We need to celebrate it as such or not at all.

So, no, a day or even two can’t contain the biggest event in history. So, I’ll go ahead and wish a Happy Christmas Eve Eve to everyone today, but with expectation of a different sort—expectation of love that doesn’t need gifts to prove its worth, expectation of joy that doesn’t end when the wrapping paper’s off, expectation of a Christ Child who will come again to heal us all.

Christmas, Expectation, Hope, Jesus Christ Tagged: Christmas Eve Eve, Friends, gifts, holiday


December 15, 2019 | Leave a Comment

The herald angels sing

They look like giant bibs, or maybe just gaudy jackets. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London had several. Truth be told, the V&A (as it’s known) is full of several of just about everything. It’s called “the attic of the empire” for a reason. It’s enormous. By the third hour wandering its galleries with my family on vacation this summer, I was ready for a break. In the gift shop, I found—gulp—another tabard, this one sized for a baby. Tabards are apparently a thing with the British.

You see, a tabard was worn by a herald. A herald was a royal messenger, sent to deliver proclamations to neighboring kingdoms. The tabards were their uncomfortable uniform.

“Hark the herald angels sing, ‘Glory to the newborn King!’…” we belt out every December. The angels in our drawings and lining up in our pageants wear white bathrobes, though. Maybe they should have been wearing tabards.

After all, the angels were royal messengers, sent by God from the kingdom of heaven to proclaim to the earth that a Prince of Peace had arrived.

“Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests” (Luke 2:13-14).

Maybe we need to start dressing our preschoolers in tabards on Christmas Eve, after all.

The proclamation these heralds came to deliver was one of “peace and goodwill toward men.” The word traditionally translated “men” means “people,” so we don’t need to get hung up on it. The proclamation is for all people, young or old, rich or not so rich, working hard or looking for work, certain or confused, hurting or whole, or all of the above.

Peace and goodwill are in short supply for many of us. Hope comes and goes, until the herald arrives to bring good news.

Remember “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” in which the horrible Herdman kids arrive to wreck the Christmas pageant? Gladys is the Angel of the Lord, who hurdles herself down the aisle of the church, hollering, “’Hey! Unto you a child is born!’ as if it was, for sure, the best news in the world.”

It is the best news the world has ever or will ever hear. Of course, to hear the proclamation, we’ve got to open our ears and our hearts. We’ve got to summon the courage to believe that healing and wholeness and love are possible.

It was the late Frederick Buechner who gently suggested, “Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.”

Now, that’s a proclamation we can trust, by any herald who delivers it, tabard or not.

Photo credit:  http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O115774/tabard-unknown/

Advent, Angels, Christmas, Gospel of Luke, Jesus Christ Tagged: Angels, Christmas Eve, Tabards, Victoria & Albert Museum


This is the day that
the Lord has made;
let us rejoice
and be glad in it.

– Psalm 118:24
Rev. Dr. MJ Romano

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Philippians 1:21
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