Christmas Eve Favorites

My favorite parts of this year Christmas eve service are many…but I’d love to name some

1. The children helping to light the advent candle. I did away with pre-planning a family to light candles (who has time to do that? not me, not them) and have been cycling through the children youngest to eldest–without repeating the previous weeks’ lighters, and reviewing the meanings as the Children’s sermons (they remembered ALL of it!!!!). Christmas Eve I invited all the children up…I believe there were about 10, to come and help to light the candles. Siblings shared holding the stick, and we did not set the church on fire….then I got to explain why we were lighting the Christ Candle and how we were going to share the light. It was awesome.

2. My children were totally distracted, my eldest belted out the carols and my middle child (who has communicative difficulties i.e. words are hard for him) answered back to every single Bible reading I made, plust there was the whining and rustling and near-escapes…but it reminded me of why we were there. Its why *my* family sings “the little Lord Jesus lotsa crying he makes” for Away in the Manger.

3. Communion, where we got to hear the choir sing plus some young adults sang the Christmas Alleluia which is the cool new Christian song (YAY). We took it by intinction (where we dip the bread), which means I got to pass to every single person, it was amazing.

4. Candles at the end, and raising the lights for the last verse of Silent Night

5. Being able to wish EVERY single person there a MERRY CHRISTMAS

🙂

Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times. View all posts by katyandtheword