Opening Christmas presents - before or after church?
I figure most people here on SI are planning on attending a church service Christmas morning, so I was curious how people are planning the timing of opening gifts. My children are all grown and live within an hour, so we are having our get-together on Sunday afternoon. One daughter and her 1-year-old son live with me, but the grandchild is too young to anticipate the opening of gifts, so we have no problem making him wait.
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We did it after church. It’s hard enough getting to church on time!
The church I am reluctantly attending after a 2 year search elected to not have Sunday services because it was Christmas…. and this is a 1000+ attending church. And to top it off, they normally have 4 services on Sunday. Next Sunday, New Year’s Day, they are only having one service apparently because they anticipate attendance to be so low… I’ll leave it up to you to evaluate what that all means.
We did it the night before, as that worked out the best for us with the schedules of various family members who would be at my home. Some of my family is local (within an hour’s distance) and would be with their own church, and one family member left late Christmas Eve, because she was planning to have people over on Sunday (she lives 2.5 hours away from us).
The ones staying with us went to church with us, and we had a nice brunch afterwards, as our church did only the main worship service, not the normal following fellowship and then application hour as many members had home plans or plans to travel to family later that day. We did have communion following the service, as it seemed appropriate to end the church year not only with a celebration of the birth of Christ, but also what it meant that he came. This year, we had so many members that stayed in town (and some with visitors) that the Christmas service was better attended than some of the earlier Sundays in December.
Families are so spread out these days, and schedules often so tight, that many families just pick the best time to do presents, even if not on the 25th, and that’s regardless of whether Christmas is on a Sunday or not. It is sad that many churches think it will be a burden on those staying locally to attend a church service when Christmas falls on a Sunday, and also sad that many professing Christians wouldn’t make attending on that day a priority.
Dave Barnhart
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