In our very preaching that Christmas is about giving and not receiving, we may miss a far deeper truth that Christmas is indeed about receiving!

For one thing, it is better to give than to receive because of what we receive in the giving. For another thing (the most important thing), Christmas was and is about the Birth of Christ, about the receiving of Christ into the World, the gift of Christ to us.

He taught us to be like the little children and children revel in the gifts of Christmas, in what they get. Growing in the joy of Christmas, they will become givers because they have first been receivers.

In their adulthood, they will remember the joy of Christmas past and see it in the joy of children present, and in the joy of all who presently receive what they and others now give.

If, in anticipating that and seeing that, they miss the point that it is all about what they themselves have received -- and not in what they now give -- then they will long for the good old days of the Christmases past.

They will miss the real joy of the present Christmas and of all Christmases, that their giving is a response to what they have received, to the love reaching out from within them, put there by the Giver of Love, Love itself, who gave us Life, who gave us his only begotten Son, who gave us himself, his self being Love.

The joy is in the receiving, given then, given now, opened then by the Blessed Couple, by the Apostles and the Faithful of subsequent generations, opened perhaps by us as children, but so often left unopened today by those who forget Christmas is about receiving, after all.

We give. We give to receive the joy of seeing the joy of others as they open what we have given.
What pain, what grievous heart-wrenching pain should our gift be rejected, be left unopened by a loved one.
Who could possibly do such a thing deliberately?
Who could do that to a giver at Christmas?
Who could be so hurtful as to refuse to receive at Christmas?