To have the faith of a child
This Christmas was the absolute best! Each Christmas since having kids, has become a little more special. This year was especially great!
I’d heard stories of watching Christmas through the eyes of your child and the magic that comes with these experiences. While we’d gotten glimpses of this last year, this year, really brought the magic!
The weekend before Christmas, my husband, being the baker of the family, made sugar cookies from scratch with our daughter (girl, I’ll be honest, if it’d been up to me, I’d have hit up my friend the Pillsbury dough boy, but baking is my husband’s happy place). Lil brother and I watched on as sis cracked egg *shells* into bowls, and baked stocking, present and Christmas tree sugar cookies (or at least that’s what they said they were… to me they resembled more of an abstract, blob art but darn it… we made sure she knew they were the best dang stockings we’d ever seen!).
Later we iced and decorated them with sprinkles, with sis not so secretly licking her fingers between each cookie (hope you’re not afraid of germs Santa!). Christmas Eve, we left them out for Santa to find, and while she seemed happy with the process, I couldn’t tell if she cared all that much.
Then… Christmas morning came…
“Mommy! Daddy! You have to come! He ate the cookies!” we heard our daughter’s sweet little voice yell as she barged in to wake us up. Her excitement was alarming and startling, but you could feel the magic in the air.
As she rushed us to the place where the cookies had been, she could not contain her excitement. She continued to yell, “he ate them! He ate them!” her little blonde, bed-head scurrying to the kitchen.
When we arrived to the kitchen, her reaction was one that could make the grinch’s heart smile. As she pointed to the evidence, her mouth turned to a circle as she squealed “ohhhh!” and then buckled over, hands to her knees looking at us wide-eyed and in utter awe. “He ate them!” she yelled again, “oh my gosh! He ate them!”
I have to admit, this moment topped the charts in “all time best memories” as a parent! It’s a moment I wish I had captured on video, but am also sure, will never be erased from my memory. Magic filled the air! My spirits were lifted, and it was as though we were all floating on the energy, pure joy and excitement of the moment!
Oh to be 3! Oh to have unequivocal faith in what is unseen! Oh to believe so fervently!
While the moment was one for the memory books and touched my heart as a parent, it also struck a chord and stung a little. In that moment, a few things hit. One, that I hadn’t felt pure, honest joy like that in, well… I’m not sure how long. Of course, I’ve had happy moments in my life over the past several years. I married my husband, I had two amazing children, I’ve shared fun memories with family and friends. But that pure joy that makes your heart feel 100% whole and, if even for a second, truly makes you feel as though there’s stardust in the air, like you’re floating and that there is no pain in the world… gosh. I can’t remember when I last felt that way!
It also struck a chord as it reminded me how little faith I so often have. In those moments, she believed without a doubt, that a jolly old elf in a red suit had, in a matter of hours mind you, traveled across the world with his reindeer and not only delivered presents under the tree, but had also enjoyed her baked cookies as a midnight treat!
She didn’t question for a second how he’d gotten into the house without waking us, how he’d carried all those presents, how his reindeer had learned to fly, or how the heck Santa didn’t have a heat stroke while layered in red fur and visiting during an abnormally warm Texas Christmas.
Nope. None of this crossed her mind. There was no reason for it to. It had purely happened. That was it. End of story. The crumbs of cookies were all the evidence she needed.
Oh to have the faith of a child. To have faith of the unseen. Whether you believe in God, another higher power or just general humanity, we all seem to have lost our faith in them all at some point in these past few years. At various moments we’ve all questioned faith in our country, science, the news, our neighbors and if some of us our honest, we’ve questioned faith in ourselves.
If I’m being honest, there are days it doesn’t feel like we’re starting a new book or new chapter as we turn into this new year. Instead, it feels like Groundhog Day. It’s as though someone continues to crank an old fashioned, rusted music box that is repeating, “this is the song that never ends. Yes it goes on and on my friend,” (you can thank me later when this song is still stuck in your head).
But, as we go into this new year, I pray that we’ll find our faith again. I pray that like my daughter who did not witness Santa eat her blob shaped stocking cookies, we will still believe in the unseen. I pray for our hearts to open again so that we can experience the pure, innocent joy that she felt when she found the crumbles of cookies left behind. And most of all, I pray that we will believe in the cosmic magic that comes when joy and faith collide!
Happy New Year!