Well, it’s the Christmas season again – days and weeks of dinners, celebrations, travels and events and head into a New Year exhausted yet filled with the memories of things just passed.

So what really matters about it all?

The gifts? Sure – they’re important. I had a great Christmas this year – not because of high priced fancy gifts, but rather the love and personal interest expressed in each one. I got a collection of greatest hits of my favorite Country Music artist, Alan Jackson, from my oldest daughter. I had asked for that. That meant a lot! I got a pair of Chicago White Sox slippers from another, and a new Chicago Blackhawks hat from yet another – all of which they knew I would appreciate!  And I did!

My wife got me a new apron – something I needed when I cook – which is one of my hobbies and usually splash all sorts of things all over myself. I’m glad for that. Oh, there were several other things that meant a lot, no doubt.

I have found, though, across my fifty years of life, that while those things are really special and precious, they don’t constitute what REALLY matters.

So what does?

The annual trek to northern Alabama – with my daughters and wife – something we’ve been doing from wherever we live for nearly thirty years now. Flying down the highway with Frank Sinatra’s Christmas music playing on the car stereo and our family and dog  together – that matters!

Joining with my wife’s extended family – each of us with our own unique idiosyncracies, to be sure – gathered in a church basement to eat together, exchange gifts, read the Christmas story and spend a few minutes together. That matters.

Playing golf on hopefully a day warm enough to not freeze to death on the course – and again this year we got to! – that matters.

Sitting with my family in a theater watching a great movie together – last night it was “Invictus” starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela – remembering the years after Apartheid in South Africa just over a decade ago as this heroic black man joined forces with a white rugby team to further the change of their country’s future and practice reconciliation. That matters.

Worshiping together with extended family numbering more than twenty on a Sunday morning at my in-laws’ church. That matters.

Eating together around restaurant or home tables laughing, telling stories, cheering for sports teams and sometimes getting into raucous debate – that matters!

Spending New Years Eve with my daughter and son-in-law and German Shepherd granddogger eating turkey in front of their fire and hanging out in their lives – that matters.

Maybe it’s middle age and sentiment settling in. Maybe it’s more emotion oozing out than before. Maybe it’s just more mature love, I don’t know – but things that used to matter don’t matter quite as much to me – and things that I used to take for granted mean a lot more now. So it is this season.

I hope you are finding it so. I pray you had moments like that in your life with those you love this holiday season. And I trust we can work to create more of them in our lives in the year ahead.

Our world is is improving and imploding at the same time – in conflicting forces of ever-increasing speed and change. Nothing that used to be secure is even predictable any more. It’s a new, wild frontier of uncertainty.

We need God, family and each other like never before. We deem money, possessions and stuff as less important than we used to. And that’s all good.
Because the things that matter are eternal in nature – are built into us in the image of God we are born with.

Let us commit anew to priorities in our lives that matter – and lowering the volume and distraction of the stuff that doesn’t as much. That is my goal for 2010. What is yours?