Making final preparations. Not too much left to do. Wife is helping preside at the 4:00 service, we’re all attending the 6:00 service tonight, I’ll be the reader for the passage from Matthew. Both kids are here. They couldn’t come home last year; the boy was stuck in Germany with visa challenges due to the backlog of applicants from the war. Yeah, our kid couldn’t come home “because of the war.” Odd phrase to be saying, but there we are. And it turned out to be our last Christmas with my father, who was gone a month later. So, we’re still digging through generations worth of their stuff. 1944. Probably somewhere in France. My grandfather spent a very cold Christmas tending to the P-47s of his unit, hoping they could get in the air to provide some much-needed air support to the troops on the ground holding off the German counteroffensive at the Bulge. A ranching man from deep South Texas, at war in Europe. A few months later, he would cross the Rhine at Worms. Today, his great-grand daughter lives and studies near the banks of the Rhine, downstream at Bonn. The world keeps turning, taking us to places, then back again. Some Christmases are peaceful reveries with family. Some are bitterly cold, in a tent (or worse), unsure of how a war will end. I’m not sure what to do with that truth. I’m glad grandpa Ted came home, and raised my mother, who had just been born in January of that year. I’m glad that our family has gone back to Germany, making friends, and a future. I don’t know what next Christmas will be like. But we have this one, right in front of us. I hope you can spend it with people you love. I hope your tent is warm, wherever it may be.