Christmas is just 73 days away. For children, 73 days seems like forever; Christmas Eve can’t come quickly enough. Probably every family has at one time or another posted an advent calendar on the wall or frig. Long ago, when our children were little and my husband, Larry, was in law school, I made an advent calendar at our student ward Relief Society. For many years, our children loved taking the little felt ornaments out of each pocket and pinning them on the tree, eagerly counting down the days ‘til Christmas.
For mothers, 73 days is almost too soon. There’s still last-minute shopping and wrapping, cooking and cleaning, get-togethers and giving. A good friend put the busy-ness of Christmas in perspective for me and eased the holiday stress by saying, “Whatever doesn’t get done this year for Christmas doesn’t matter, for Christmas will come again in just 12 short months.”
Now is the time to start thinking about Christmas 2005. Lest it make your head spin thinking about all the things you need to do for next year, ponder spiritual gifts.
The Harold Ure family has a tradition of giving Christmas gifts to Jesus. Each Christmas afternoon, after the usual morning of exchanging presents, they symbolically give their gifts to Christ of goals they accomplished during the year, such as kindnesses they had done or improvements they made in themselves.
During a Saturday night session of the Salt Lake Brighton Stake conference in January 1987, President O. Brent Black introduced Clay Ure, a young man with Downs’ Syndrome. President Black asked Clay to read Moroni 10:4-5. Those of us who heard Clay could feel his love for the Book of Mormon as he read these two verses. It was one of those moments when the Spirit nudged me, telling me to contact this family and write an article about Clay for the Ensign. [i]
Reading the Book of Mormon was Clay’s gift to Jesus in 1986. Until the beginning of that year, Clay had never been able to read at all. His mother tried many times to teach him to read as had his school teachers. Clay’s mother, Betty, felt she had to find a way to teach her twenty-five-year-old son to read so that he could function better. She prayed and received the answer that she should use the Book of Mormon to teach him to read. Most of us would not regard the Book of Mormon as easy reading, but of all the reading material available, Betty knew none could benefit her son more than the Book of Mormon.
At first her goal was to read one verse a day, beginning with 1 Nephi 1:1. Slowly, very slowly, they progressed through the first part of the Book of Mormon. Late in the summer, Clay told a family friend he was going to give his Book of Mormon to Jesus as a birthday present. Betty calculated how many pages they had left, which seemed almost impossible to complete. Nevertheless, on December 20, 1986, Clay finished the last verse of Moroni 10 and wrapped his copy of the Book of Mormon to give to Jesus as a gift.
One gift we could each give the Savior is reading the Book of Mormon from cover to cover as Clay Ure did. Except for the youngest children, everyone of us already knows how to read so such a gift is very possible.
Gifts That Please Him Most
Most of us have had the experience of puzzling over what to give a loved one, whether it be a spouse, child, friend or parent because either a) they already have everything; b) they’re hard to please, or c) we can’t afford what we’d really like to give them.
What kinds of gifts will show our love for Jesus Christ, will be gifts that will please Him most, and that are within our power to give?
Just the Right Gifts
One of the things I enjoy most about Christmas is trying to find just the right gifts for the people I love. I enjoy thinking about their interests, their needs, their wish lists, and then searching in catalogues, in stores, and on-line for something that is unusual and that they’d really like. One year I searched online to find a copy of Harry Potter in Slovene and one in Portuguese for our returned missionary sons, who want to keep up their language skills. Another year I wrapped beach towels with a note to our children that the towels would be used shortly on a trip to Mexico.
Preparing a gift for Jesus Christ is really much simpler. His requests don’t change from year to year for whatever is the current popular item or unusual gift. His greatest desire is simply for us to be perfected in him.
“And behold, all that he requires of you is to keep his commandments; . . . he never doth vary from that which he hath said; therefore, if ye do keep his commandment he doth bless you and prosper you.” (Mosiah 2:22.)
My favorite gifts, both to give and to receive, are handmade and from the heart.
One year my sister presented me with a beautiful queen-size Christmas quilt. I know that she spent many hours in planning, cutting, and sewing this quilt. Each December 1st as I get it out of storage and place it on our bed, I am reminded of the effort and love of this gift.
Another year, my husband asked our children not to buy him a gift from the store, but to give him something they had written. He very much enjoyed reading the focused thoughts of his sons and daughter and appreciated that they gave him what would please him.
There are many handmade gifts from the heart that would please Him—Jesus Christ. Like the Ure family we too can give gifts of ourselves to Jesus Christ. It’s not even necessary to wrap symbolic gifts to put under the tree. Perhaps we could give the gift of coming to sacrament meeting on time each week for the entire year; or attending Sunday School classes faithfully to study the doctrines of the gospel; or researching and submitting ancestors’ names for temple work; or completing our home teaching or visiting teaching all 12 months; or forgiving someone; or becoming more charitable.
A South Pole Christmas
While most secular Christmas stories take place at the North Pole, this one, however, takes place at the South Pole and may not sound like the usual Christmas tale. But it really is about giving gifts.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott led a party of 24 British gentlemen on an expedition to the South Pole in 1911. According to Anne Fadiman, they wintered over at “Cape Evans, the cozy little Antarctic hut that was pretty highbrow. Three nights a week after dinner—which on special occasions included seal consommé and stewed penguin breast–-Scott convened sessions of Universitas Antarctica. Topics for discussion included the future of aviation, the art of Japan and the parasitology of fish. The men listened to Caruso on their gramophone, wrote poetry, painted watercolors, or read books some of them had imported 14,000 miles. Scott himself brought a selection of Russian and Polish novels.
“Scott and his companions, slowed by bad weather, inadequate rations, inferior clothing, second-rate tents, and because they were animal lovers, hauled their sledge themselves rather than using dogs, reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, only to find that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had planted his country’s flag a month earlier.
“On their return trip, with two days rations left at the end of March, Scott and the dwindling number of explorers, all of them faint with hunger and ravaged by scurvy, pitched their tent as a raging gale approached. They had walked 740 miles from the Pole. Their base camp was still 140 miles away, but One Ton Depot, where an ample supply of food and fuel was cached, was only eleven miles away.
“Seven months later, a search party found their small green tent with three frozen corpses inside, tucked in their reindeer-hide sleeping bags. Next to Scott’s body was a sheaf of letters he had written to his wife and the wives and mothers of his companions, and his journal.
“The search party found on his sledge: 35 pounds of rocks containing late-Paleozoic fossil leaves, which the men had dragged 400 miles. Scott had been so eager to travel light that he had weighed his party’s food rations to the last fraction of an ounce, but he didn’t dump the rocks. If he had, he and his men might have been able to walk the last eleven miles.” [ii]
Those Antarctic explorers came so close to making it to safety, to returning home, but they froze to death instead because they were not willing to give up their rocks.
In Alma 22:18 we read: “I will give away all my sins to know thee, and that I may be raised from the dead, and be saved at the last day” (emphasis added).
Elder Eyring’s Story
How many of us are clinging tenaciously to those rocks that weigh us down, that keep us from making it to our eternal home? All we have to do is to give away our sins, pebble by pebble, rock by rock.
The message of the Antarctic rocks was told in another way by Elder Henry B. Eyring. He said: “There is another gift some of us may want to give that takes starting early. I saw it start once as a bishop. A student sat across from me and talked about mistakes he had made. He talked about how much he wanted the children he might have someday to have a dad who could use his priesthood and to whom they were sealed forever. He said he knew that the price and pain of repentance might be great. And then he said what I will not forget: ‘Bishop, I am coming back. I will do whatever it takes. I am coming back.’ He felt sorrow; he had faith in Christ. And still it took months of painful effort.
“But somewhere this Christmas there is a family with a dad who holds the priesthood, once that student, and they have eternal hopes and peace on earth. He will probably give his family all sorts of brightly wrapped gifts, but nothing will matter quite so much as the gift he started a long time ago in my office. He felt then the needs of children he had only dreamed of and he gave early and freely. He sacrificed his pride and sloth and numbed feelings. I am sure it doesn’t seem like a sacrifice now.
“He could give that gift because of other gifts given long ago. God the Father gave his Son, and Jesus Christ gave us the Atonement—gifts of unfathomable depth and value for us.
“Jesus gave his gift freely, willingly to us all. He said, “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again.
“No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:17-18).
Elder Eyring continued: “I bear testimony that as we accept that gift, given through infinite sacrifice, it brings joy to the giver. Jesus taught, “I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance” (Luke 15:7).
Elder Eyring said: “If that warms you as it does me, you may well want to give a gift to the Savior. But he seems to have everything, doesn’t he? Well, not quite. He doesn’t have all of us with him again, forever—not yet. I hope we are touched enough by the feelings of his heart to sense how much he wants to know each of us is coming home to him. We can’t give that gift to him in one day or in one Christmas. But we could show him today that we are on the way.” [iii]
An Unexpected Gift
Many of us have had at one time or another the embarrassing experience of receiving an unexpected gift and having no package to give in return.
Don’t let Christmas 2005 come and not have a gift to give. There is no last-minute shopping for a gift that takes a year to prepare. We can’t find our gift on e-bay, in a catalogue, or at the mall. Our gift to Jesus next year costs nothing—yet requires much from us—diligence, humility, patience, endurance. Our gift is unique—it will be like no other gift, for it is from each one of us personally. No matter how large or how small, our gift will be treasured. Unlike material gifts that break, wear out, or become outdated, our gift to the Lord is eternal.
And always, in the paradox of the gospel of Jesus Christ, we cannot give without receiving more in return. The gifts we labor to create, perform, and perfect to give to Jesus Christ are really gifts to ourselves. “Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” (Matt 25:34.) In a revelation to the Prophet Joseph Smith, the Lord said: “And if you keep my commandments and endure to the end you shall have eternal life, which is the greatest of all the gifts of God.” (D&C 14:7.)
[i] “Clay’s Gift to Jesus, March 1990, 62-63.
[ii] Ex Libris: Confessions of A Common Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 26-28.
[iii] ”Giving with Joy,” Ensign, December 1982, 10-11.
