Family Devotions - The True Spirit of Christmas

We talked about the true spirit of Christmas this morning.  We started out by reading her a little book we had telling about who Santa Claus really was, his name was Nicholas and lived in Myra in Greece.  She enjoyed the story and then we found a short video on You Tube with the history of St. Nicholas that we found interesting.

    

Here is the link to the video: http://youtu.be/59L_lt4U59A

We then talked about the important thing in Nicholas' life was that he loved God and he gave up his possessions, gave sacrificially to help the poor and did it in secret.  He wanted his giving to glorify God and not himself.

We sang the hymn, "I Surrender All" and then read this scripture:

Philippians 2: 2 Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. ³ Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; ⁴ do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. ⁵ Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, ⁶ who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷ but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. ⁸ Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. ⁹ For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, ¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹ and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

This scripture pretty much sums up what Christmas is all about.

Note:  We feel a need to clarify some things as we have had some feed back on this post.  We do not believe that Jesus Christ was born on December 25th.  The exact date of his birth is not important, just that he came as He did to save us from our sins. The  date, December 25th, was a pagan holiday that was adopted by the Roman Catholic church.  

We do not believe that Nicholas of Myra was a Saint that is to be prayed to and above other people.  He was a man just like you and I.  He was a Christian when Rome persecuted the Christians.  He was in prison when Constantine lifted the persecution against Christianity.  Constantine did not make Christianity a state religion, he just established tolerance to Christianity. Emperor Theodosius 1 made Christianity the state religion of Rome.  We do not promote the myth of Santa Claus coming and bringing gifts at Christmas to our daughter.  She knows that it is a fairy tale made up by men. The only thing we tell her is that the fairy tale came from some truth, that he was a man and only emulate the example of giving to the poor.