Different Christmas

This has been a year for a lot of firsts in the White household. This year my eldest and only daughter married. My son, turned 16 just the other day and now holds a driver's permit. This is the first year that my mother has not been here with us. Thanksgiving was a quite a bit different without seeing her and I know Christmas will be the same. Even when we didn't see her at one of the holidays, we did talk and it was always good to hear her cheerful voice. But she never held it over me that I wasn't always there. I knew she loved me and the miles that separated us were brought together by the love that flowed from her heart to mine.
So my old married daughter wasn't with us for Thanksgiving. She and her husband had to work. That's the reality of getting married. For Christmas, they are flying to Oregon to see my son-in-law's brother, family, including the new baby. So it will be a different Christmas this year.
My mind goes back to the kids young years when they couldn't sleep the night before and we had to get up so early just so they could open their gifts. Then we had to wait for grandparents to show up. More ripping and tearing. Perhaps we would go to the other set of grandparents (we were fortunate in that for a while we lived in the same town as both sets of parents). I don't know that I remember one single gift. But I do remember the smiles, the hugs, the love. There'll be lots of those this year, but two sets less than the year before.
Life goes on. And the assurance I get is that God is right there in midst of us with his own set of smiles and hugs and mostly love. Merry Christmas! Remember that one day over 2000 years ago there was a little child who was born. Immanuel. God with us. He changed everything. JW