My First Christmas

“Christian doesn’t have any religious meaning in my family, even though we always eat together on the evening of December 24th. But this year everything will be different for me. I celebrated my first real Christmas!
“Giselle, I’ll introduce you to some girls who live the Gospel in Santiago,” a friend told me last month.
Through them – the Gen – I got to know Jesus and that encounter changed my life. I even received a Christmas Crib as a gift and it became a part of my house for the first time.

I knew I still would be able to celebrate Christmas as I would have liked, because most of my parents still think like before. But, this year, I wanted to do something different. I spent Christmas Eve preparing supper like every year, but unlike other years I went to Mass with some friends after supper.

In spite of all the cooking and preparing, nobody showed up for supper. At first I felt really bad and even thought they had perhaps done it on purpose to make fun of me. But then a thought came to me: What is important for me don’t necessarily have to be important to others; on the contrary, it was obvious that it wasn’t!
How much I would liked to share with my relatives the joy of Jesus’s birth! Before supper, I silently recited Grace before meals. It was my first Christmas supper. Then I went to Mass.

I thought perhaps they weren’t ready yet, and perhaps they never would be. But I wanted to do all I could so that they might also receive the gift I received, which changed my life: getting to know Jesus. It’s what I want the most for the people I love.

One time at home, when everybody had already gone to bed, I wrapped some small presents, just little things, to surprise my relatives. I placed them under the tree with a note that said: “Happy Christmas! Follow the arrow and find your present.”

My father woke up at five thirty, my father was the first to wake up and notice the note. So he woke up my mother. Around nine they woke me up, and my very strong brother carried me in his arms to the living room. I couldn’t wait any longer from the joy to wrap a present for me too! I was very touched. It was beautiful to see what Love does, even in those who don’t how to call it by name.

Christmas still doesn’t have any meaning for my family, but they felt all the love I left for them under the tree. And there’s no one who can resist against Love.”