The Whole Family Mobilized for Christmas

As Christmas draws near, I can't help but think of our family's yearly traditions. First, we use Family Time to talk about how we'll celebrate the season — from preparing our hearts, to decorating inside and outside the house, to special activities over the break. We plan it all together, making sure the whole family mobilizes to welcome the arrival of Christmas.

From Advent to Christmas

In fact, well before Christmas itself, we spend four consecutive weeks of Family Time observing Advent together. The word "Advent" comes from Latin, meaning "coming" — it’s about waiting for the coming of Jesus Christ, both commemorating His first arrival in the world and looking forward to His return.

Advent decorations traditionally center on an "Advent Wreath" holding five candles: four purple (or three purple and one pink), plus one white. Purple represents solemnity and majesty, pink represents joy, white represents Christ’s holiness, the wreath’s green leaves represent the renewal of life, and its circular shape represents eternal hope.

During this Advent season, we light one candle at each Family Time, and that candle becomes the theme of what we share together that week.

The first week’s candle, for instance, symbolizes hope, and we use it as a starting point to reflect on how the families of Israel, in that turbulent age, longed earnestly for the coming of the Messiah — and what Christ’s birth means for us today, as we face declining social morals and the pressures of a postmodern culture. Do we, too, long for Christ’s second coming, so that our own lives might be kindled with living hope?

In the second week, when the candle symbolizing preparation and faith is lit, the first candle is relit alongside it, and so on. The third candle symbolizes proclamation and joy; the fourth symbolizes revelation and love.

Finally, on Christmas Eve, we light the last candle — set in the middle, white — the "Christ candle," symbolizing the Savior’s coming as the light of the world. With all five candles glowing, the whole family celebrates the arrival of Christmas together. During this time, we reflect deeply on the purpose of the Lord Jesus’s birth and what He teaches us about how to live, examining with repentant hearts whether our lives align with His will. Lighting the candles represents turning from darkness toward light. Each year we first revisit the true meaning of Advent before welcoming Christmas together, which makes Christmas in our home feel especially deep and meaningful.

Sharing Good Things with Good Friends

Right inside our front entryway, we work together to set up a Christmas tree and prepare gifts — small in cost but rich in meaning — to place under it one by one. During this season, anyone who comes to our home for a special Christmas gathering, especially friends who are seeking faith, receives a simple but meaningful gift. And of course, I also prepare a secret Christmas gift for each member of our own family.

Chinese-language books are quite expensive overseas, and I happen to be a longtime lifetime supporter of Campus Magazine and Cosmic Light Magazine, so I often receive new books these two publishers send as gifts. Since moving to North America, I've changed my old habit of underlining as I read; instead I sort and keep the new books I finish, and each year, depending on the different needs of the people I care about, I give them out as Christmas presents, wrapped and delivered. People often can't put them down, and in small groups everyone shares what they've learned, sometimes even trading books to read — an unexpected bonus.

December 24th, Christmas Eve, happens to be our second daughter's birthday, so we always hold a brief family worship service to celebrate the Lord Jesus's birth and her birthday together. Afterward, everyone hurries off to bed, because the next morning is the joyful time of the whole family opening presents — also a chance for the family to experience God's abundance and love together, counting up the blessings He gave us over the past year.

In 2013, apart from our eldest daughter, who stayed in Toronto for graduate research after finishing university, my husband and our three other children came with me to Los Angeles, where I studied at seminary for a year. The four of us moved into a one-bedroom apartment on campus; our second daughter transferred to a California university to study social work, occasionally coming back to sleep on the floor over weekends.

Since I was busy with seminary coursework and our apartment was cramped, we didn't have room to set up a Christmas tree. As it happened, that was the year we joined a Salvation Army church and became Salvation Army soldiers, so we found another way to celebrate Christmas — the whole family volunteered together in the Salvation Army's Christmas kettle bell-ringing campaign, and helped the church deliver Christmas gifts to low-income families.

A New Experience Ringing the Bell

What kind of organization is the Salvation Army, exactly? Its roots go back to 1865, when Reverend William Booth, then serving with the Methodist church in London, gave up a comfortable pulpit ministry to go out among the crowds and preach the gospel of Christ to the homeless, hungry, and forsaken people of the slums.

Reverend Booth originally intended, once he’d led these people to faith, to bring them into established churches to worship. But he gradually realized that regular churchgoers at the time were uncomfortable worshiping alongside these ragged, poor newcomers, and the new believers likewise felt out of place stepping into a church. So he began doing social outreach on one hand, and, depending on what a given place needed, would either establish an outreach post or, in some places, plant a church. Today the Salvation Army carries out its work in 126 countries worldwide, and Southern California alone has thirty-one Salvation Army churches.

As for the Christmas kettle campaign, it dates back to 1891, when Joseph McFee, a minister in San Francisco, wanted to provide 1,000 free Christmas dinners to poor and hungry people so they could feel the warmth of the season. But where would the money come from? So he proposed setting up a red kettle to raise funds, calling on the public to give whatever amount, large or small, as a practical way to help. Six years later, the practice had spread from the West Coast all the way to New York City, and quickly expanded to major cities across the country. Today the kettle campaign has spread worldwide, and every year, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, the funds raised help countless people in need, right when they need it most.

Overcoming every obstacle, our whole family mobilized to join the church's Christmas kettle campaign, stepping up our practice of Christmas carols. Putting on our Salvation Army uniforms, we felt we were putting on the full armor of Christ to serve. The church organized all the volunteers into shifts, and you'd find us out raising funds at Walmart, McDonald's, and other large stores, or wherever crowds gathered in the city.

Choosing, as a whole family, to volunteer together, ringing the Christmas bell in front of crowds of strangers, was a rare and valuable discipline. We’d often have Americans come up, give a thumbs up, and tell us a friend or relative of theirs had once been helped by the Salvation Army — someone freed from alcoholism or drug addiction, someone who received financial or material support, and so on. I felt surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and I thought of the verse: "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me" — which is, I think, the best expression of the true spirit of Christmas.

You, too, can hold a family meeting, put your heads together, and think about how to celebrate Christmas differently this year — bringing the good blessings of faith, hope, and love to more people in need.

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