Christmas has always been a very important time in my family. It’s a time of singing Christmas songs, decorating, baking, and all around merriment. As the years have gone on, Christmas traditions have grown and changed as my brother and I got older, but some things, like the early Christmas morning race to the living room, haven’t changed a bit.

When we were younger, a tradition we shared was making reindeer food to leave out for Santa’s team. After all, we lived on a small farm basically in the middle of nowhere. We were sure the reindeer were exhausted from the effort of finding us. Our reindeer food consisted of oats and a ton of glitter. My brother and I also convinced our mom to toss in a few carrots. Hey, if the horse liked them, why not reindeer? We used to leave a dish of this mix on the front porch, only to have it be mysteriously emptied by morning. Although most of it probably got tossed over the fence sometime during the night, I have a sneaking suspicion that our old Bassett Hound poked his nose into the bowl a few times.

Another family tradition was baking sugar cookies for Santa. We always used the same cookie cutters: a star, an angel, a gingerbread man, a stocking, a snowman, and a candy cane. After we cut them out (and inevitably argued over who got to cut out the last piece of dough), we decorated the cookie with red and green sugar. On Christmas Eve we would pick out our favorites to leave out for Santa, often the ones we had spent the most time decorating.

Decorating was a big part of Christmas growing up. We would turn on Christmas music and haul out box after box of ornaments ranging from handmade objects from elementary school art class, to crocheted ornaments mad by my grandmother. After all the ornaments were on the tree, it was time for the grand finale. As the oldest (and, for a while, the tallest, that title has since been claimed by my “little” brother), I was in charge of placing the angel on top of the tree, a job I took great pride in. Once the angel was safely atop the tree, it felt like the Christmas season could truly begin.

However, my favorite tradition had nothing to do with cookies or trees, or even Santa’s reindeer. My favorite tradition was sitting on the floor around my dad’s chair while he read the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke aloud. On Christmas Eve night, when my brother and I were anxiously awaiting the new toys that Santa would bring, my dad would open his Bible and remind us of the baby Jesus, the King of Kings, born in a manger with nothing but hay and barnyard animals around him. It was a reminder that Christmas was not about getting the new Playstation or a new bike. It was about celebrating the gift of salvation that was born in a stable.

While all of these traditions were fun, it is the story tradition that I hope I will pass to my children one day, so that they can know why Christmas is so much more than cookies and presents. It is a time for celebrating the forgiveness that came into the world that starry night in Bethlehem.