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So what’s Christmas all about anyway? Gifts. Lot’s of gifts. Oh really? Is it now… Just the other day, I had one of the most candid conversations with Megan I’ve ever had about Christmas: It’s not about mass consumerism and giving people you love (or don’t even know) a ton of gifts.

Christmas is about *one gift. *The gift. It is Jesus. Jesus is the beauty behind the holiday. God come to earth. God becomes man. Emmanuel: God with us. God demonstrates with acute clarity that he cares especially for people – for his people.

I guess it’s really hard to explain this concept to just any passer-by…

The Christmas message doesn’t just stop with the coming of Christ, though. The story is really just beginning… The gift is not just Jesus being *born. It’s Jesus *dying. It’s Jesus *coming alive again, conquering sin and death itself, that we might live forever by simply *believing* that what I have said is true.

Christmas is not about all this “stuff”. It’s about Jesus. That’s it.

Some of you know that I have a little problem called tendinitis. I’ve been told that I have both “golfer’s elbow” and “tennis elbow”, which is to say, the tendons on the top and bottom sides of my upper forearm are wacked. I’ve been given two solutions, by two different sports medicine people:

1) “Build fortresses on your arms.” Meaning: lift weights and build strong shoulder muscles, because the rest of the arms depend on strong shoulders. The other problems will soon go away.

2) “You need to constantly massage your arms.” Meaning: hire an Asian woman with some strong hands.

Well, I say all this to say that I probably shouldn’t be typing any more today. My tendinitis is flaring up. I’ll probably try and rub them out tonight, and probably pop some pills, too, to try and pull the swelling down. Toodles.