A day with family is never wasted

You could think of it as a lost day, a day in which I achieved nothing productive. Nothing checked off my to-do list. No weekend tasks completed. Even skipped church.

On the other hand, I spent an entire day, virtually without interruption, with my daughter, her husband and their two children. Although we have decorated the house this year, my wife and I are not expecting any of our children to spend Christmas with us. It is a first in our nearly 38 years of parenthood.

Although we'll have some friends and neighbors drop in, the children and grandchildren were not planning to come here. On Christmas day, we'll travel and be with those children and grandchildren, so it will be a family day as it has always been, and we will be joyful and thankful for the day and the gathering. But the decorating, which has taken weeks and considerable effort, seemed a waste without the people who had shared the festivities with us all these years.

So we were glad to have our four guests here just for the day. My wife had offered to have our grandson help us decorate our Christmas tree, and he was eager to help. She threw in an offer to help him make Christmas cookies as an added incentive. We even managed to have a family meal in the dining room, eating off the Christmas china and enjoying sugar cookies and gingerbread men for dessert.

The culmination of the day was holding my 2-year-old grandson over my head as he placed the angel, handmade by his grandmother, atop the tree in a re-enactment of a ceremonial tree-topping some 30 years ago when I held his mother over my head, and she slipped the angel onto the highest bough. A photograph records that long ago event, as I lifted my younger daughter above my head, and she reached precariously to find the topmost sprout. Now the cycle seems complete as I held her son in the same manner, and he giddily achieved the same lofty goal, unaware of the significance of what we had done.

On this day when tasks and routine were left undone, I feel no regrets, for we have accomplished a better feat, instilling in a new generation a family Christmas tradition. May the circle be unbroken.