The reverend extraordinaire Nicholas Lubelfeld is our resident sage on all things theology, especially when it comes to the Anglican tradition. As is his common way, Nicholas helps us lean into the season with tender hearts and endearing humility.

Transcript

So here I am, this little boy in Detroit, Michigan, looking up through the boughs of a Christmas tree and imagining these worlds of light and being captivated and transfixed by the wonder of it. And here I am beginning to enter as one of the little steps of grace into this relationship with the Father that Jesus had by nature, and here, by grace, I get to share in this. Of course, at the time, I couldn't describe it that way, but that was what was happening. That's what it means to be adopted as a child of God.

I remember, advent at my house was a definite period, because we didn't have Christmas until Christmas. Christmas was December 25th in the evening, sundown, that's when it started, 12 days of Christmas. So my father would go out on Christmas Eve with me, and take me with him and get a tree. By then, of course, a lot of the trees were pretty dry and picked over. So we usually used to get the worst trees. And if you looked at them wrong, the needles would fall off, they were kind of threadbare, but they smelled good and you could hang ornaments on them, so that was fine for me. That's all I knew. And I loved it. But we we had Christmas at Christmas.