Christ, Our Savior, Is Born
2023 First Presidency’s Christmas Devotional
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Dear brothers and sisters, merry Christmas!
We are grateful to gather with our dear First Presidency in this Christmas devotional. Wherever you are this Christmas season, may you feel God’s love as we celebrate Jesus Christ as the heart of Christmas.
Christmas is a time of music, smells and tastes, anticipation and generosity. A time of gathering, whether we live near or far.
Often Christmas becomes Christmas when we quietly bring Christmas joy to others. Many families sub for Santa. Many individuals light the world with the light of Jesus Christ.
A Christmas memory recalled is a Christmas memory made anew. Layered over time, Christmas memories become traditions, which can deepen our love for Jesus Christ—the Lamb of God, the Son of the Eternal Father, the Savior of the world.1
If you have favorite Christmas memories, may you joyfully savor them this season. If you are still creating your Christmas traditions, may they deepen your love for Jesus Christ and bless you each year.
May I share three favorite Gong family Christmas traditions?
First, each year, Sister Gong and I love seeing again the Christmas ornaments which tell our family story.
As a young married couple, Sister Gong and I attended graduate school in England. We lived in a small apartment on a tight student budget. We counted our pennies before buying a scraggly little Christmas tree even Charlie Brown would have felt sorry for.
Always creative, Sister Gong used clothespins to make little British soldier ornaments for our Christmas tree. She gave each one a black woolly hat and a smile.
For 43 years, these clothespin British soldiers have stood at attention on our Christmas tree. They remind us of our first married Christmas—far from home—and each succeeding Christmas.
Our son’s family made these clothespin “meeples.” They depict missionaries around the world. Can you see their smiles? International dress? Name badges? I’m told one was made to look like me.
Our Christmas ornaments renew warm memories of friends and experiences in many places. The happy, eclectic parade of Christmas memories each year makes us smile.
The prophet Alma testifies the earth moving in regular form denotes there is a God. Christmas marks a familiar point in the earth’s 365¼-day yearly circling of the sun. As this annual rotation returns us to a treasured Christmas season each year, I think of what author E. B. White wrote about “The Ring of Time.”2
He suggests that only with experience do we understand “time does not really move in a circle at all.” The ring of time may seem “perfectly formed, changeless, predictable, without beginning or end.” But only when we are young do we imagine we can make a complete circle and end no older than when we began.
For me, my coming to each Christmas somehow the same and somehow different hints at how time (and space) can be simultaneously linear and circular. How a “strait and narrow path”3 and “one eternal round”4 can be complementary descriptions of a covenant reality centered in a Christ child born at Bethlehem.
In this way, for me, part of the magic of Christmas is to be a child and an adult at the same time. We delight as an adult in what now delights the child we once were. And we delight with a child as we create and recreate memories and traditions together.
A second favorite Gong family Christmas tradition is to display our family crèches, or nativities—depictions of the birth of the holy Christ child.
Don’t you love how nativities focus on Jesus Christ, inviting us to do the same? As a recently returned missionary said, “Before my mission, Jesus Christ was part of my life. Now He is my life.”
Our family’s crèches come in every imaginable size and setting, made from every imaginable material, from every imaginable place. Each crèche witnesses Jesus Christ and His blessing every nation, kindred, tongue, and people.
We love that God’s children everywhere depict the baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Wise Men, shepherds, and animals with settings, features, and details that are familiar, relatable. These crèches also remind us God loves all His children; we see God’s love in the features of our crèches and nativities wherever they come from.
A third favorite Gong family tradition, in addition to reading together the scriptural accounts of our Savior’s birth, is to read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol aloud as a family.
If I put on a scarf and a top hat, can you imagine me, for just a moment, as Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol?
Some years, our family reads A Christmas Carol from start to finish. We stir our hot chocolate with candy canes and laugh at references to “Norfolk biffins” and “smoking bishop.” We shiver as Jacob Marley’s ghost clanks his chains. We are heartened as the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future help Ebenezer Scrooge become a new man.
Some years, our family reads a shortened version of A Christmas Carol, abridged by our daughter-in-law and son to fit the shorter attention spans of younger family members.
And some years, with smiles and good humor, our family reads the bumper sticker A Christmas Carol. It contains only two lines: “Bah, humbug” and “God bless us everyone.”
Charles Dickens began writing A Christmas Carol in October and finished in early December 1843—a period of only six weeks. The first run of 6,000 copies was published in London on December 19, 1843. It sold out by Christmas Eve.
Those documenting the background of A Christmas Carol explain Charles Dickens was writing at a time when Victorian England was reconsidering the meaning of Christmas. What role could or should a Christmas season, Christmas trees, Christmas greetings, Christmas family gatherings, Christmas cards, even Christmas carols play in society?
At a time when many felt unsettled, isolated, and lonely, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol addressed a deep yearning for friendship, love, and anchoring Christian values, just as Ebenezer Scrooge found peace and healing in his past, present, and future.
Then as now, the true meaning of Christmas draws us closer to Jesus Christ, born as a babe in a manger. Jesus Christ knows according to the flesh how to succor us with bowels filled with mercy. Then as now, Christmas celebrates covenant belonging, communion, and community in Jesus Christ and each other.
Here let me ask a different A Christmas Carol question. Why, when we think of Scrooge, do we think primarily of a grumpy old miser, someone who scoffs at Christmas as a big, well, humbug?
Why don’t we acknowledge more the new Scrooge? The new Scrooge, who generously sends the prize turkey as a Christmas surprise? The new Scrooge, who reconciles with his cheerful nephew, Freddie? The new Scrooge, who raises Bob Cratchit’s salary and cares for Tiny Tim?
Let the skeptics scoff. The new Scrooge “did it all, and infinitely more.” He became as good a man and as good a friend as the good old world knew.
So why don’t we remember that Mr. Scrooge? Are there those around us, perhaps we ourselves, who could be a different person if only we would stop typecasting or stereotyping them as their old self?
No person and no family is perfect. We each have foibles and faults—things we wish to do better. This Christmas, perhaps we can receive—and offer—Jesus Christ’s precious gifts of change and repentance, of forgiving and forgetting, of giving those gifts to others and ourselves.
Let us make peace with the past year. Let go of the emotional angst and noise, the frictions and annoyances that clutter our lives. May we grant each other our new possibilities instead of fixating on our past limitations. Let’s give the new Scrooge in each of us a chance to change.
Our Savior came at Christmas to liberate the captives—and not only those in prison. He can free us from the ghosts of our pasts, unshackle us from the regrets of our and others’ sins. He can redeem us from our self-centered, selfish selves through rebirth in Him.
“For unto you is born this day … a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”5
So merry Christmas!
May your Christmas traditions and memories be merry and bright.
May we rejoice in Jesus Christ, at Christmas and every day.
I joyfully testify of Him in His sacred and holy name, Jesus Christ, amen.