Advent Devotional: Third Sunday of Advent, December 15, 2024

December 15, 2024

On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Matthew 2:11

Illustrated by Grayson Myers (Age 9)

This is a story about gifts.

Several years after Bill and I married, my mother-in-law shipped us a home-made fruitcake for Christmas. The loaf was packed full of dried fruits and nuts, lovingly chopped and prepared with a lot of effort. This became a tradition and each year we could be sure that sometime in the weeks before Christmas the mailman would bring us a home-made fruitcake. We lived far from our families and almost never saw them at Christmas so there were no witnesses to the fact that we were not fans of the fruitcake. We’d unwrap it and nibble at a slice or possibly two and then it would be put aside and when it was dried out and unappetizing even to a fruitcake fan, we’d throw it away. This felt wrong even as we wrote an appropriately appreciative thank you note to put in the mail.

One year, I wondered if our fruitcake could somehow become tastier. I found a recipe for a sauce in my cookbook. Some years I made the sauce with rum flavoring, some years with actual rum. Now we looked forward to the fruitcake. After my mother-in-law could no longer make them, we bought one at the grocery store, sometimes two.

After my own mother’s death, I was going through some of her papers and stopped short at her correspondence with the Collin Street Bakery in Corsicanna, Texas. In all my childhood I don’t believe there ever was a fruitcake in our home. But for a number of years she had been ordering fruitcakes and having the bakery send them to my father’s family in Ukraine at Christmas. Fruitcakes! This, from the correspondence, was not always a smooth process. One year a cake intended for Christmas arrived in February at a town 25 miles away, but found its way to the family eventually. Another year the cake passed through Leningrad in Russia and then was returned to my parents in Boston in May.

In 2021 I was exchanging Christmas greetings with an elderly cousin who has gone to France to get away from the war in Ukraine. He wrote me that he remembered that my parents had always sent his family a cake for the holidays, “this is one of the memories of my childhood.”

Scripture tells us that the Magi had traveled a long and difficult route to present their gifts. They brought them to the infant Jesus to acknowledge his majesty and deity. Scripture records this as sign of what a gift Jesus is to all of us. Many gifts are more than just things. They carry our emotions and wishes and hopes. In my family a symbol of love and caring and effort and memory is a simple fruitcake.

Oh, and if you can get your hands on a 1962 edition of “The Joy of Cooking,” you’ll find a great recipe for Liqueur Cream Sauce on page 730.

Dear God, thank you for the gift of your son, Jesus. Help us learn to appreciate all the gifts you give us day by day. Help us learn to love and care for all your children and to always share what we have, especially in this Christmas season. Amen