Merry Christmas! Happy New Year Too!

I pray you will have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! May all of God's blessings be upon you and your family.
I'm busy breading shrimp and making rice balls. Each member of my family does some of the cooking for Christmas Eve. And so I'm preparing my part of the meal. "Food is love" as a psychology professor once stated, but I learned that from growing up in an Italian American household in Brooklyn.  Good food, cooked with love is part of what is best about being Italian American.  Growing up we always had lots of family, friends and neighbors eating over, sharing meals, yes food is love. I learned that early on.
And so, this is Christmas, a beautiful time of the year, made ever so glorious by the knowledge of Christ and His gift to humankind and to me personally.  To know Christ, to love God that is the fullness of life and the hope of existence.
To know Christ, to be part of the great Christian tradition is a gift beyond measure, beyond words. I can't wait for Mass tomorrow, before the Christmas Eve meal, my family will attend a beautiful family Mass which will engage my senses and give me a feeling of awe and completeness.
To know Christ is to realize life without God is lacking depth, lacking real meaning, lacking the fullness of truth.
The older I get the more I can appreciate the Incarnation, the extraordinary gift of God that is and what it means for my life, as a human being.
Knowing Christ means appreciating the encounter, the communion that Christ offers and being aware of what that adds to life. Christmas brings hope, hope that "all will be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing will be well"  (Julian of Norwich).
God Bless You!
NJA