We recently posed a Facebook question asking our viewers on that site what their favorite Christmas memories were. Those responses will be published in a special article next week during our Christmas Edition but one thing was very clear: No other holiday stirs the emotions as memories of Christmas.

When you ask people what their favorite Christmas memory is, it almost always takes them back to when they were younger. Whether that be when they were a child or youth, or even young parents celebrating first Christmases.

It’s funny how we always seem to think life was better years ago. To be fair, in many cases, we’re probably right. The danger, though, is to get so focused on the past that we fail to recognize how great the present is.

I have several favorite Christmases myself and like many of you, they revolve around my younger years. When I was growing up, I remember seeing all the Christmas movies and TV shows featuring snow-covered Christmas mornings and always wondered why we never had those events in Jena.

My brother and I dreamed about waking up Christmas morning and looking outside to see snow…any snow…even just a dusting, but to see a couple feet of snow like in the movies would have been more than wonderful.

Of course, that never happened. The vast majority of Christmas mornings when I was growing up had us short sleeve shirts and shorts rather than thermals and jackets.

I do remember one Christmas morning in 1973, when I would have been around 4 years old, waking up to what I think was a heavy frost, which we of course interpreted as snow.

That Christmas was special not just because of the “snow” but because my brother and I received our first big-boy bicycles, equipped with those wonderful training wheels. Due to the cold temperatures, it took all morning of begging our mother to let us go outside to ride them as back in those days mothers believed any child outside in cold temperatures was surely going to come down with the flu. (I personally think she just got tired of us trying to ride them inside the house and was afraid we were going to crash into something important.)

Those were the perfect Christmases, when my mind had me believe all was perfect with the world, nothing bad ever happened, and being a kid was great.

As people get ready to celebrate Christmas next weekend, I’m sure there will be lots of emotions involving excitement and joy, but I’m also reminded that there will also be those who will have emotions of sadness and in many cases, depression.

This will be the first Christmas without certain loved ones here. That special grandparent, parent, child, sibling, and more. If there is one thing I’ve learned in my few short years on this earth, it’s that special occasions without loved ones never get easier and in many cases, it gets harder as the heart always grows founder with the absence of special people.

I’m sure there will be many in our parish that will spend Christmas Eve or Christmas morning fighting through the tears as they try to make the best of the holiday while dealing with such a devastating loss. May we all remember those in prayer in the midst of our celebrating.

I had a preacher friend of mine share some advice once that might just help when thinking about this very subject.

Once, he was preaching a revival meeting in a small, country church with very few in attendance. The next week, this preacher was going to preach at a very large conference where he was a featured speaker and he was very much looking forward to this conference.

While visiting with a man in the small country church before the service one night, the preacher was excitingly sharing with the man about the conference the following week. The older gentleman could see the excitement in the preacher and loving asked him if he could share some advice with him. My friend said “yes” and the wide older man said: “Don’t leave us until you leave us.”

Simple, yet so profound. In other words, God has placed us here in this moment of time for a specific mission and reason. We shouldn’t get so caught up in the future, or for that matter the past, that we fail to realize the importance of this moment here in the present.

As much as I like to reminisce about the past, I owe it to those in my life right now to not become so focused on my distorted memories of perfect Christmases long ago that I fail to enjoy the Christmases of the present.