Christmas Time is Family Time. Sort of.

We passed a billboard today on our way to deliver a "you work in retail and it's Christmas Eve" starbucks coffee to my sister. I was in the car with my two daughters and as we got onto highway 40, Fiona says, "Christmas time is family time."

"What?" I ask.

"That's what the billboard said just there. For some church."

I thought about it. I thought about the first Christmas and how it wasn't anything like family time. Mary surely had family; she was young and even if we accept that her parents were dead, she had to live with someone, an aunt and uncle perhaps? There had to be family. Joseph, too, must have had some family. But they weren't with family on Christmas.

Mary stayed with Elizabeth for months tending to her pregnant cousin. But when she gave birth she was alone.

"She was with the shepherds," Fiona points out.

"They weren't family. Shepherds are hired men. Unclean."

"But she wasn't alone," she stresses.

No, I suppose she wasn't. But it had to feel that way. This insurmountable task of giving birth outside the comforts of your home, without your aunt or mother or older sister holding your hand and reassuring you.

Easter, now, it was kind of a family event. Christ appears to his friends. He appears to the apostles gathered in the upper room. Pentecost. Family affair.

But the first Christmas is lonely.

We get caught up in Christmas. I feel like it plays with our minds. Amalgamation happens--we take the best bits of each childhood year and mash them together as if that is what Christmas always was. Daisy said to me that it just didn't feel like Christmas without snow. I told her that she'd actually only seen one or two white Christmases. But you think it's supposed to snow.

You think it's supposed to be a great big dinner around tables with perfect food and great conversation. My brother pointed out that it's really green bean casserole and pasta salad with canned olives and the TV is playing a James Bond movie in the background. You think the kids will open gifts and it'll be the best gift they've ever received, when often they are bombarded with noise and light and working on very little sleep and it's impossible to live up to those expectations. You think that everyone will be happy to be there and then you're shocked to hear that your sister in law finds Christmas very awkward or your sister has a bad cold and a headache and could she just stop by next week?

The people you want to visit with don't come...or are so busy visiting with everyone that you never get a moment with them. Your cousins kids have a fever so she skips the event altogether. All the teenagers sit on their phones the whole time. You chose the wrong bra to wear for an all day event on camera (or maybe that's just me).

But we keep doing it. We keep trying to live with the imperfection and make it work. We keep taking Christmas, this commemoration of God's Incarnation, and spend it giving gifts to each other to celebrate the Incarnation within each of us. It's truly namaste in action: the sacred in me recognizes the sacred in you.

And it is family time. But it's not matching turtlenecks and fluffy white dogs family time. It's messier than that. As well it should be. God came into this world in about the messiest way possible. And we should honor that.