Don't let the great thing about Christmas for your adopted child get swallowed up by the good.

December 2006

To create a wonderful Christmas for their children, thousands and thousands of parents around the world are thinking about how to weave together gifts, food, music and decorations. We want to see glittering lights reflected off of glowing, happy faces. We try to set up the right conditions for picture-perfect moments. Because we love our little ones, we want to bless them with a magical Christmas.

Some of us with newly adopted children at home may feel these desires even more acutely. We want to celebrate the new children in our midst by showering them with every good thing that we can. We ache for the time they have been without family, and want to use the family and cultural traditions of Christmas to lovingly enfold them to us.

But the effort it takes to create this perfect Yuletide season sometimes exhausts us.

This December, I don’t want the great to be swallowed up by the good. I do enjoy gift-wrapping and cookie-baking. But there are deeper wonders all around me, wonders not created by my own organization, creativity, or even by love for my children, but wonders offered to me from God.

What are these wonders? Well, there is the miracle that my four children are here, living under this roof with their parents. Birth children are, of course, wondrous. And somehow adopted children can seem even more so – How could it be that these two boys, born so far away from me in so many ways, have become family? It is wondrous, the journey they have taken to arrive here, to the family, however imperfect, to which they belong.

It is a wonder that God has good work planned for my children to do, that he is even now preparing them for that work in ways I can’t even see. It is a wonder that my life will be interwoven with the lives of these four amazing people – forever.

And what else is wondrous? That God emptied himself and took on the body of a weak, humble baby. That he was born, homeless, to a poor woman in an obscure town in the backwaters of the Roman empire. It is a wonder that the record of that extraordinary birth has been carefully kept and passed down from generation to generation so that my children and I could be free.

There are more special blessings embedded in this Christmas wonder for those who love adoption. Jesus was adopted by Joseph – so that we could be forever adopted by our Father. We can celebrate adoption as we celebrate Christmas.

The magical Christmas we imagine is filled with lights that break, cookies that get eaten, and gift wrap that is thrown away. It is possible for all of these celebrations to represent God’s good creation and gifts to us. They can indeed give us special opportunities to love our children. But they are nothing compared to the real wonders that quietly surround us.

Maybe I won’t get around to replacing that broken strand of lights or find the perfect gift, and maybe the cookie decorating won’t turn out as idyllically as I’d pictured. The biggest gift I can give to my children this Christmas is my own wonder and awe at what God has done for us all.

My children don’t need me to create a magical Christmas. The Christ of Christmas has already created the magic – for all of us.

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Copyright 2006, Kristin Swick Wong. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission from the author.