{"id":305764,"date":"2017-12-26T05:10:40","date_gmt":"2017-12-26T04:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/my-first-christmas\/"},"modified":"2024-05-15T20:36:05","modified_gmt":"2024-05-15T18:36:05","slug":"my-first-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/my-first-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"My First Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cChristian doesn\u2019t have any religious meaning in my family, <\/strong>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 <\/em>Christmas! \u201cGiselle, I\u2019ll introduce you to some girls who live the Gospel in Santiago,\u201d a friend told me last month. Through them \u2013 the Gen <\/a>\u2013 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, <\/strong>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, <\/strong>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\u2019t necessarily have to be important to others; on the contrary, it was obvious that it wasn\u2019t! How much I would liked to share with my relatives the joy of Jesus\u2019s birth! Before supper, <\/strong>I silently recited Grace before meals. It was my first Christmas supper. Then I went to Mass. I thought perhaps they weren\u2019t 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\u2019s what I want the most for the people I love. One time at home, <\/strong>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: \u201cHappy Christmas! Follow the arrow and find your present.\u201d My father woke up at five thirty, <\/strong>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\u2019t 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\u2019t how to call it by name. Christmas still doesn\u2019t have any meaning for my family, <\/strong>but they felt all the love I left for them under the tree. And there\u2019s no one who can resist against Love.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Giselle from the island of Cuba just became Christian and this year will be her first Christmas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}