Why do you give Christmas gifts to people you know and love? If you are like most people, you have spent considerable time this past month seeking out and purchasing Christmas gifts. Black Friday and Cyber Monday were weeks ago. They started the gift purchasing season. The end is Christmas Eve and it is this weekend! You have only days left to make your purchase! The retail industry, the shipping and logistics industry, the candy industry, the restaurant industry, the movie industry, the toy industry, the wrapping paper industry, the ornament and blinking lights industry all have one thing in common. They depend upon you shopping for gifts during this season. If you don’t shop, they will go out of business.

So I ask again: why do you give Christmas gifts to people this time of year? Is it purely a business decision – you are trying to bolster the economy? Absurd! You buy gifts for another reason. Is it due to peer pressure – everyone else is doing it and you don’t want to look like a clod? There may be some truth when it comes to the obligatory gift to someone like your boss, but I suspect that there are other people in your life you are buying for that have nothing to do with peer pressure. So why do you give Christmas gifts to people? I think the real reason has something to do with a longing deep inside every person to be kind, generous and charitable towards another human being. I like to give gifts to people because it warms my heart to express to them, in a tangible way, that they matter to me. There is something rather redeeming about that quality in human beings. It seems we are at our best when we are acting in a selfless, giving way rather than a selfish and taking manner.

You might know that the idea of giving gifts during Christmas dates back a couple of millennia to the birth of Jesus Christ. The story is told that wise men, or Magi, mysteriously showed up, unannounced in Jerusalem in Israel at the court of King Herod the Great asking where the newborn King of the Jews was located. The wise men had brought gifts with them - very expensive gifts – and had been tracking a star they believed announces the birth of the new king. There is a lot of mystery surrounding the wise men. We often say there were three of them because there were three gifts mentioned in the biblical account in connection with them (gold, frankincense and myrrh.*) In reality, we have no idea how many of them there were. Neither do we know where they came from or where they went after they found the child and his family. Some have suggested they were court appointed scholars from the Parthian Empire who had access to Babylonian scripts and that they came upon the writings of the prophet Daniel who had predicted the date of the coming Christ 500 years prior to its occurrence.** What we do know is these wise men went to great lengths to find the Christ child. When they did, they were overjoyed, they bowed with their faces to the ground in worship, and they presented their treasure trove of gifts to him.

When you give someone a gift during this season, you might want to savor the moment when the wrapping paper is coming off and consider that Christmas gift giving is rooted in joy. Real joy goes beyond the value of the gift. It is really about the sentiment – what is being expressed from one person to the next. I think that is the real reason we give gifts at Christmas. That feeling is something we all desire. It’s been that way for over 2,000 years. I would encourage you to embrace the joy this Christmas.

Merry Christmas!

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*Matthew 2:1-12