If they celebrate Christmas, there are three things that everyone has an opinion on: best side dish, real tree vs fake tree, and best Christmas movie. There have been maybe a million Christmas movies made since they first started filming them. Some are almost universally loved like Elf or It’s a Wonderful Life. Some are controversial about their inclusion like Gremlins or Die Hard. Some are a little dark or crude or even scary—some of my favorites that I won’t list, haha.
Whatever your favorite might be, I would venture a guess that watching it is more about the warmth and nostalgia it brings up rather than its quality as a film. Memories like these can be activated any time of the year, but around the holidays we’ve built in so many patterns trying to recreate things we loved about the past. Our memories can be a weird thing to contend with because things change as we think about the past.
This is why the fish grandpa caught keeps getting a little bit bigger. And as we think about the good times, I hope they do keep getting better and better. In Luke 2, after the birth of Jesus, the whole sky lit up! And the shepherds came to investigate what was going on.
Luke 2:16-19 says, “16 And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger.17 And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. 18 And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.
By this point Mary had been through it! She’d been visited by an angel, carried a child, traveled far from home, and given birth in less-than-ideal conditions. But when she reached the end of one journey (and the beginning of another) she treasured all of them and thought about all that had happened.
Take some time this Christmas to ponder the movie of your life, and all the things that brought you to where you are.