My Favorite Season. What’s Yours?

Singing Christmas Trees of First Baptist Orlando
It certainly doesn’t feel like winter here in Orlando, Florida. All of my senses say ‘summer’. Lights in palm trees doesn’t cut it for this gal. You see, I grew up in New York City with ice skating outside at Rockefeller Center. It was C-O-L-D but we loved it because we could slide down piles of snow the plows left by the curb. I’m not referring to small humps of snowdrift. I mean six and seven foot mountains of icy cold white stuff.

What else could a kid growing up in the city look forward to? Warm chestnuts sold from carts by vendors. They also sold a thing called ‘Charlotte Russe’ which was a sponge cake and REAL whipped cream in a cardboard cup. Ahh, sigh. Those things are probably gone in our 21st century. I haven’t been back to NYC in winter for 40 something years so I am no longer an authority on that yummy stuff. At least the Rockettes are still around at Radio City Music Hall. Please, please don’t update its name to something like Virtual Pixilated Music and Light Review. If it ain’t broke, please don’t fix it. We need to keep some nostalgia for our kiddos and let the young’uns experience what their parents and grandparents loved.

It may be warm here this Christmas Eve but I definitely will try my best to imitate cold weather. My electric fireplace will fakely burn and we will celebrate with hot Wassil made by Trader Joe. We will tell our funny stories of the year or watch Jimmy Stewart in “It’s A Wonderful Life” for the umpteenth year while our grandkids play video games on their phones. For me, the best of all is to celebrate the birth of my Lord Jesus at the Singing Christmas Trees, with thanksgiving in my heart to God for giving His Son. The Gospel has set me free from myself and my sins and blessed me with joy and peace beyond anything I could ask or think. It is hard to perceive that that little baby was born to die for us. I opened my heart to ask Jesus in and make my life (and me) what it should be…like caring for others and not selfishly for myself first; by loving them by meeting their needs instead of mine, and sadly, praying for those who do not want to know Him. Their loss; their desolation so that they do not even know what they have missed for their life; mostly my prayers for their loss of eternal life with God and His Love instead of the eternal darkness they will have.
Yes! I am forever blessed to have Jesus in my life.