Making Christmas Last

Welcome to what our calendars call the “Boxing Day” edition of Things Unseen. As long as I can remember, it’s always been a holiday in the United Kingdom. And so, you can understand that when I was a child, it struck me as a very curious description for the day after Christmas. It apparently was not the one day in the year when you were allowed to fight with your big brother. In fact, I remember that people seemed to think it was a kind of “tidy up the mess” day after Christmas, put everything back in boxes. And I had my own version because Christmas was, apart from small gifts on my birthday, the one time in the year you would get a special present. And so, we looked forward to it, anticipating it for weeks in advance, and it was a magical day.

And I suspect like many other children, on Boxing Day, I would try to recapture the feelings of the day before by putting my presents back into their boxes and then opening them up again. But of course, it was never the same. It could never be the same. Christmas Day was Christmas Day, twenty-four hours only once a year, unrepeated until near the end of the next long year—another year to wait for the excitement, the joy, the presents. And as a child, I hated this letdown and the demands it made on my patience. And try as I might, I could not make Christmas last. And when I later became a Christian, I couldn’t help asking myself this question: Is it possible to make Christmas last?

And that’s where the words of Hebrews 13:8 have come to mean so much to me: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” I suspect I may have referred to these words several times in the course of this past year and maybe pointed out that the author of Hebrews thinks of “yesterday” not as the day before today, but what he elsewhere calls “the days of Jesus’ flesh.” And “today” is not just this period of twenty-four hours, but the “today” he refers to in 3:13 when he quotes Psalm 95 and says, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the wilderness,” and indicates that “today” is still true in all our todays—that is, in all the days between the ascension of Jesus and His return in glory. He’s the same today and tomorrow and the next day, and He will be forever.

He will forever be the person He was when He came and lived among us in the days of His flesh. He’ll be the same Jesus who was born in Bethlehem, who walked the dusty roads of Galilee, who was crucified outside Jerusalem, who rose again and ascended and is seated at right hand of God and makes intercession for us, and who one day will come again in glory. That’s the Jesus whose birth we celebrated yesterday. And listen: Jesus has not changed since yesterday.

I said that as a child, I thought Boxing Day had to do with boxes in which my presents had come, but actually, it’s called Boxing Day for another reason entirely. It’s because the day after Christmas Day traditionally was the day Christians would put food and other things in boxes and distribute them to the needy. In a way, it was saying, at least symbolically: “In His birth, the Lord Jesus gave Himself to us, and in His death, He gave Himself for us. And now, He lives to take care of us in our need. And so, in response, in Jesus’ name, we want to take care of you as well in your need.” And that’s surely one way we can make Christmas last. That’s how we can extend what it means to us beyond ourselves and beyond the one day we celebrate it.

Did you get enough at Christmas this year? More than enough? Then remember that in as much as you do something for one of the least of Jesus’ brothers, you do it for Him, who has done so much for you. And if it’s a holiday today where you live, perhaps you should take just a moment to think of one simple way in which you can make Christmas last not just for yourself but also for others who so deeply need to know our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s inexpressible gift.