How to prepare a Christmas to help us improve?
And suddenly, when we still believed that this had just begun, Christmas has arrived. It has been without realizing it. In a few weeks, our environment has filled to unsuspected limits of cloying lights and ornaments increasingly Americanized.
And we are nobody if we do not have our own decoration, so we decided to carry out an intrepid adventure, much more dangerous than fishing trout with a spear in a river full of crocodiles: we go to a shopping center to buy the ornaments. And of course, amid cries of "child, do not miss", the exhausting stress of the buying hordes pressing and the thunderous music, one neither sees nor feels, nor suffers, nor remembers the true meaning of Christmas.
That I'm not going to put myself now in the plan "Christmas Story", it's not about that, but just to remember a bit what Advent means, that time between the four Sundays before Christmas Eve. For those of us who are believers, it is a time of preparation for the coming of Jesus. For everyone equally, we have an opportunity to grow as people and help our children to do so too.
Of course, this is much easier said than done. The illusions and promises are usually great, but there is little energy to get them going. And when the living room shines in its maximum splendor, newly decorated the tree and with the Bethlehem in preferential place, everything what leaves us are good intentions. To see how many exceed the limit of a couple of days *
As this always happens, at home we devise a trick that gives good results and that is very visual for adults and children. It consists in identifying the preparation of the arrival of Jesus with the "real" conditioning of the manger in which he will be born.
The trick is in the slips of paper: each one each day will have to write an easy commitment to fulfill. It's always my turn "not to scream". He says very little about my patience ... We help each other with these commitments: not to be objectionable, help more in the housework, shower without Mom having to ask for the umpteenth time ... everyone in the house knows about what foot limp, and if not, there are the attentive brothers to help in fraternal correction, in the most literal sense of the term.
At night, when we pray and review the day, the key moment of this Christmas preparation arrives: each one reviews his commitment and decides. If he has done badly, everything goes on as it was. And your commitment returns to the box. If you have done it right, you can remove a bit of litter from the manger and put a cotton ball. The goal is that the whole crib is full of cotton and, with lots of help from above, every year is achieved.
