The Christmas holiday season is always ablaze with beautiful colors. I find it hard to be gloomy or grumpy this time of the year. I must confess, not everybody belongs to this “Holiday Cheer Club.” It is an exclusive club but open to anybody who is tired of being grumpy.

Colors abound throughout the season and the Christmas songs highlight this. “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” “I’ll have a blue Christmas without you.” “Rudolph the red nose reindeer.”

Oh, the wonderful colors of Christmas.

One of the most obvious colors of Christmas is green. Right at the center of this Christmas holiday is the Christmas tree decked from top to bottom in beautiful colors and lights. Nothing says Christmas quite like an old-fashioned Christmas tree.

My thoughts along this line are, let the grumps and grouches complain about the Christmas tree. For myself, I will look with admiring wonder at the beauty of the Christmas tree.

Then of course, who could forget good old Santa Claus dressed in his red suit. I never could figure out why Santa’s suit was always red. Throughout the years, I never gave it too much thought and assumed it was a fashion statement from the North Pole.

I had some time this week to do a little rummaging through my old thought gallery. For the most part, we only celebrate Christmas once a year. I think Charles Dickens had it right with old Mr. Scrooge, after his conversion, celebrating Christmas every day of the year. I wonder what kind of world this would be if all of us would celebrate Christmas every day of the year?

If I were president of the United States, I would enact a law that would set aside one year to be a year of celebrating Christmas all 365 days. I think I would only have to do it once and nobody would want to go back to the old grumpy times of celebrating it only one time out of the year.

I was thinking about this the other night when the Gracious Mistress of the Parsonage jarred me back to reality.

“Have you,” she queried most seriously, “finished with your Christmas shopping?”

Christmas shopping! I had forgotten about it. I know we celebrate Christmas every year but I sometimes get so caught up with celebrating Christmas I forget about buying Christmas presents. After all, that Christmas tree would be somewhat naked if there were not Christmas presents to litter around the bottom.

I had to look at my wife and say, “No, I haven’t even started.”

By the time the dust of that thought settled I had to ask her, “How many Christmas presents do I have to buy?”

“Silly boy,” she said with a chuckle that could compete with good old Santa Claus any day of the week, “you got to buy Christmas presents for everybody in our family.” Then she chuckled some more just to set that thought into my cranium.

Everybody in our family? Now I am beginning to see red.

Santa’s red suit has nothing to do with a North Pole fashion statement; it has everything to do with my financial statement.

I got a piece of paper and together my wife and I jotted down all of the members in our family. A few members I wanted to veto, but my wife vetoed my veto. By the time we were done, I would have to purchase Christmas presents for hundreds and hundreds of family members. Boy, did I see red!

At the beginning of the month of December, my checkbook is in the black, but each day of the month the black begins to fade into expanding shades of red. By the time the 24^thof the month comes around my checkbook is a solid, brilliant, scarlet red.

I sighed quite deeply as I closed my checkbook. I almost said to my wife, “Remember the day…?” I stopped short of vocalizing that thought. I thought back when we first were married, which seems like hundreds of years ago, we only got presents for each other. I bought one present for her and she bought one present for me. What a Merry Christmas we had back in “the day.”

A few days later as we were wrapping those presents I began thinking of another color. I looked at my wife and said, “This must be what they mean when they talked about the golden days.” She laughed, and I thought some more.

My thoughts centered on the fact of what a wonderful family we have. After all those years, we have accumulated a marvelous family. Thinking about all the ones in my family, I began to retract those thoughts of veto.

“You know,” I said to my wife quite thoughtfully, “red becomes my checkbook.” All that red means all that family.

The Christmas holiday season means family. There is no family more glorious than the family of God. The Bible says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16 KJV). The whole spirit of Christmas has to do with giving, and God started it all.

I do not mind a “red” Christmas because everyone in my family is worth it. As Tiny Tim said, “God bless us all, everyone.”