Savor Your Gifts—Don’t Be So Quick to Return Them

Christ is Born! Glorify Him!

I will never forget Christmas I spent with a priest from Africa. It was the year 1999. Christmas was on a Saturday that year. When I brought Fr. Costa (his name) to our town in Connecticut, it was on December 23. We went to the local mall to buy Fr. Costa some things—most of his belongings had gotten lost during his trip from Africa to the United States, where he was studying at our Seminary in Boston. We went to buy Fr. Costa some essentials like a Bible, a watch, a sweater, etc. As you can imagine, the mall was completely jammed. Traffic was terrible. Everyone seemed angry and stressed out. To someone who had never been in a mall, Fr. Costa couldn’t understand all the stress two days before our feast of great joy, the Nativity of Christ. I tried to explain to him how stressful it is to shop for gifts when the clock is counting down only two shopping days until Christmas. And how people shop for months for the perfect gift, and for some people, the obligatory gift, and for others who are hard to shop for, the impossible gift.

We celebrated a beautiful Divine Liturgy on Friday evening, December 24, and another Divine Liturgy on Saturday morning, December 25. We got in the car to go to church on Sunday, December 26 at 7:30 a.m. and there was bumper-to-bumper traffic on the main street in my town. Then Fr. Costa said something that still makes me laugh to this day. He said, “Father Stavros, what great Christians you have here in Connecticut. They went to church Friday, they went to church Saturday and they are so eager to go back on Sunday that they are jamming the streets at 7:30 a.m. the morning after Christmas.” I said, “No, Father, the church will be empty today.” He responded, “well, where are people going at this hour of the day?” And I answered, “There are going to the mall, to return their gifts.” He said “What?! Didn’t you say that they stress out about buying gifts for months? I haven’t even digested Christmas dinner and all of these people are taking their gifts back!” Later that afternoon, we went for a walk around my neighborhood. A neighbor was throwing out his Christmas tree. Fr. Costa joyfully exclaimed to him “Merry Christmas!” The man answered “Christmas is over!” Fr. Costa, “no, Christmas has just begun, we celebrate for 12 days.”

How we’ve come to celebrate Christmas as a culture is pretty sad. We usher the season in the day after Halloween. The build-up to Christmas is a combination of stress (gift shopping, decorating, writing cards, wrapping, cooking), debauchery (a seemingly endless stream of parties) and gluttony (sweets and pastries everywhere you look). Even last week, I heard people saying “can you believe Christmas is already here?” To which I thought “yes, I can, I’ve been preparing for it for 40 days.” Once Christmas actually arrives, there is almost a collective relief, rather than joy, that it has come.  And the day after Christmas, many people toss their trees and even more return their gifts, a combination of ingratitude for what we’ve received from others and ingratitude for what we’ve received from Christ. It’s like Christmas is over and we are on to the next thing. And perhaps there isn’t much to celebrate if we haven’t done anything to spiritually prepare for Christmas.

The message of today is simple—Savor your gifts, don’t be so quick to return them. We are talking about four kinds of gifts. First, the gifts you received for Christmas from others. Many people actually put thought into gifts they give to people, intending for them to keep those gifts and hopefully enjoy them. We shouldn’t be so quick to return what has been given to us. Second, the greatest Christmas gift we receive is Christ, come into the world, so that in the words of St. Athanasios, “God became a man, so that man can become like God.” Christ came into the world to show us the way back to the Father. We shouldn’t be so quick to forget this gift, or ignore it, or even trade it for something else.

Each of us has been given intangible gifts by God, in the form of unique talents and skills and also in the form of life itself. Today is a gift. We shouldn’t be so quick to ignore or take for granted our gifts. We shouldn’t be ungrateful about them either. We should embrace today with joy and utilize our gifts with joy and with purpose—they are from God Himself. We shouldn’t always be wishing we had different gifts or constantly comparing ourselves with others and what they have. The last and greatest gift is the gift of salvation that Christ offers to everyone through His Cross and Resurrection. We shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this gift. It seems that most people exchange this gift for something else. They exchange the opportunity for eternal life with an attitude of “you only live once” and getting whatever we can out of this life.

The verse from I Timothy 4:14 is very to the point: “Do not neglect the gift you have.” That goes for gifts we received this Christmas, the gift of Christ this Christmas, the gifts and talents and life we’ve received from God and the gift of eternal life that can only come from God.

Savor your gifts—Don’t be so quick to return them!