I had said that I would not shop on Christmas Eve again, but there I was going from store to store.

This year Christmas has been particularly busy for me. There were many things I didn’t get to that I should have or really wanted to.

I just couldn’t fit it all in. Each day I had plans to do more than could possibly be done in a day so there was always some carry over.

And in that list of things, shopping for Christmas presents seemed to get bumped the most.

It’s okay to put it off from one day to the next to the next, but you eventually run out of days. And there I was staring at Christmas Eve and still needing some presents for the family.

I know people who complete their Christmas shopping in August. I don’t know how they do it. I can’t think Christmas when I’m sitting on a beach with the water lapping at my feet.

I’ve also had a bad experience with early Christmas shopping … but it wasn’t me doing the shopping; it was my mother.

She got way ahead of herself one year, and bought presents for my brother and me. But by the time Christmas came, she had forgotten all about them.

Those presents showed up mid-Christmas morning unwrapped, while my brother and I were wandering around the house thinking, “Is that it? Is that all we get?”

I don’t want to be doing that. I also don’t like wandering around stores in a daze or trance-like state, looking for the perfect present which I will only know what it is when I see it.

That’s not a good feeling.

There was one Christmas – it seems like a hundred years ago now – that I had thought of getting Lily a sweater for Christmas.

This was in the days before we had children. We were living in Edmonton, a city with more than a few big shopping malls.

I had scouted out all the women’s clothing stores in all the malls and had seen a sweater that I liked in one of them.

The only problem was I couldn’t remember which store or which mall I saw it in.

Christmas Eve became a little frantic for me. It was Lily’s main gift and I couldn’t locate it.

To make matters worse, the sweaters were starting to all look the same and I couldn’t remember exactly which sweater was the one.

I literally flew from one store to the next, from mall to mall in search of a sweater I hoped I would recognize when I saw it in a store I had been in over the last few weeks.

I was in a panic at 4 pm, dragging myself through West Edmonton Mall like I was in the middle of the desert without water.

I went in to one store and literally had to convince myself that this was the sweater and that it would fit her.

It all worked out back then. But it was deja-vu all over again this year … I’m never doing this again – for real!

Here’s the thing: We sometimes get so caught up in details that we miss the big picture. Christmas is about celebrating Christ but we get all stressed about having the right present. Often in life we are so detail focussed that we bump our relationship with Christ to the next day and the next, thinking we have time. The details will always pressure us, but you can run out of time with Christ. Don’t let that happen; make Christ a priority today.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What kept you too busy this Christmas? Leave your comments below.