Christmas Blessings

Advent is the strangest time to not be in the parish. I don’t find the same to be true in Lent because most people aren’t busy like pastors are busy in that season. But when December rolls around, everyone seems to be in a hurry. There is a rush to get to the finish line on Christmas Day or so I’m told.

My job right now is to cuddle with my kids and tell them the Christmas story again and again. I’m teaching them carols to sing to their babies and hoping by God’s good grace that they somehow get that Christmas is not all about Santa. (Why is my four year old so attached to this thing that I haven’t emphasized at all?) I get to bake cookies and everything feels very slow compared to the frantic pace that I remember well from congregational leadership.

I remember the stress when there wasn’t worry about variants and droplets adding to that usual Advent stress. I am praying for you, dear pastor. I am because you are doing so much and I want things to be just the tiniest bit easier for you. So I’m creating this gathering of all of the things you might need or want for your Christmas planning from the stuff that’s already in these pages and you can’t be bothered to search for. It’s all right here.

As the days are getting shorter and the grief of this pandemic season is just endless, the service I wrote last year for the Longest Night might be what you need in your ministry right now. I really love this one. It might be my favorite. I challenged myself to write a series of blessings for the grieving and I really like how it came together. I still like it though you might tweak some of the language to reflect this year. (I give you permission to edit, as needed.) When the Night Has Already Been Too Long can be purchased here.

Last year, I also created a series of liturgies for Christmas Eve including this service called Shadows and Light which is a Lessons and Carols kinda thing except that it is also like a Tenebrae service where the birth of Christ welcomes the whole Light of the World in a quiet, gentle sorta way. I have another complete Lessons and Carols Service in Coronatide from last year that might work for this year. I am keenly aware that the use of a lot of the poetry that I have used would require additional licenses and permissions. It’s for this reason that I created The Joy the World Needs musing on Howard Thurman’s Work of Christmas and some beautiful words shared by United Church of Christ colleagues.

Or if this service is a little “political” for your good people — and it might well be — then you could just download this wonderful blessing from two talented United Church of Christ colleagues who launched this new worship collaborative and are offering this Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols script for FREE.

I also created something simple — really, really simple — for an outdoor worship experience on Christmas Eve that tells the story without speech or song. Hard to believe, I know. The good news shines through in Christmas Eve Under Pandemic Skies and it can be purchased here.

Sunday rolls around really, really quickly after Christmas Eve and I wanted to have multiple options for you, dear pastor, because I know you don’t want to preach. This year, I created this fireside experience designed for Zoom. You get to stay in your pajamas, dear pastor, and you deserve it.Or you might opt for the new liturgy I created called New Year Epiphanies. You can read all about it here.

You might also decide to use New Year Epiphanies on that Second Sunday of Christmas if that’s not when you are celebrating Epiphany. I offered these Pandemic Prayers for Epiphany last year and I’ll be sharing more ideas for the whole Season after Epiphany in my next email — so be sure to subscribe here.

Until then, you might be planning ahead for the second week of January rolls around because you might get a vacation or something blessed like that, and so you might be looking for for these Pandemic Prayers for Baptism of Christ. It’s a series of prayer stations and might be one of the favorite things I’ve created in this long pandemic season.

I hope these many things bless you this Christmas, dear pastor and though I’ve said it a thousand times and you might not really believe it, still, I am praying for you, dear pastor. I’m praying for you so much. I really am.