A Birthday Cake for Jesus

At Christmas we’re all winners when we think about what happened in a little Bethlehem stable over 2000 years ago. We celebrate that in so many different ways and I’ve had a great time reading about which Christmas traditions are favorites of yours.

One thing often mentioned by those of you who entered my Christmas giveaway was Candlelight services. Many of you plan to be at your churches on Christmas Eve hearing the Christmas story in word and song as you think about the light of Jesus coming into the world. Before my mother died, I attended the services at her church several times on Christmas Eve. They started their service at 11 p.m. and ended it with everybody quietly leaving the church by candlelight (the candles we carried) as the church bells rang the midnight hour. That was always a spiritually moving experience. Our little church has a candlelight service but never on Christmas Eve. Still, it’s a great service that helps us remember why we celebrate Christmas.

Then many of you talked about how you loved decorating your trees with treasured ornaments that brought back memories of Christmases past or people you loved. I have some of those on my tree for sure.

A fun tradition shared by many of you is making a birthday cake for Jesus and singing “Happy Birthday” to Him. Susan wrote about how this tradition started in her family and how it has continued through the years.

When I was expecting my second baby, I took my 2 1/2 year old son to a Sunday School Department party. After a devotional story, the leader sang a song “Jesus Has a Birthday.” We couldn’t wait to go sing it to Daddy. We sang it when the grandparents came for Christmas. We started having a birthday cake for Jesus that year, and have continued doing that with our children a total of 6, our 16 grandchildren and now with our almost 6 great grandchildren. We felt it was important for the children to know it wasn’t all Santa. First and foremost it was Jesus’ birthday, the greatest gift given. This year as 35 of us get together I plan on adding “When I wish you Jesus, I’ve wished you everything!”

What a gift you have given your children, Susan, with this tradition.

And the Winners are:

I’ve drawn for the winners of my Christmas giveaway with the help of random.org. Each response or blog comment for my Christmas giveaway got a number and then I threw all those numbers into the random hat and pulled out three. I always want all of you to win, but that would be a lot of packages to mail and I simply have to get my Christmas presents wrapped before the kids show up next weekend. 🙂 But I should have plenty of time to get a few winning packages in the mail.

I’ve already sent messages to the three winners and heard back from two of them. First place winner was Alice of IN. She gets the Willow Tree Nativity figurine and chose my new book, These Healing Hills. Second place winner was Jeanne of TN who gets the Novel Teabags and she chose my book, Scent of Lilacs. Third place winner was Judi T who will get her choice of one of my books. For fun, I picked an additional “just because” winner and that is Maria P.

Thanks again for joining in with my giveaway fun and for sharing your Christmas traditions and more. You’re the best and I wish each of you a very Merry Christmas and a few good books under your Christmas trees.