Some fun, some girl power, some Christmas spirit, some vampires…hopefully, something for everyone. Merry Christmas!

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In honor of Christmas, enjoy one of my favorite songs my mom and her sisters used to sing. (Obviously, this isn’t a recording of them, but Bing Crosby sang it pretty well, too.)

Many people attend church only for Christmas. In contrast, many of us Mormons attend church every week—or even more often, if you count midweek service projects, socials, educational activities, and church ball.  (Personally. I wouldn’t count church ball as church attendance, but technically, it is located at church.)

In fact, we Mormons are probably less likely to attend church on Christmas than any other day of the year. So, what to do when Christmas happens to fall on Sunday, like this year?

Acknowledging that we Mormons just aren’t accustomed to spending Christmas at church, my local stake is abbreviating church on Christmas day to a one-hour service. Additionally, several members of my ward choir are going to visit a local nursing home on Christmas day to sing a few carols for a half hour before the church meeting begins.

This plan brings back warm memories for me. When I was a child, my talented mom and her four equally talented sisters had a little performing group that kept all of us busy during the Christmas season.  I loved tagging along with them, both because I enjoyed the performances and because I liked the Christmas festivals where they performed.

But one of my most vivid memories of those days was a performance at a much less festive location.  My mom and her sisters arranged to sing at my grandfather’s nursing home one December.  The thing is, he wasn’t there.  He had died about a month earlier.

I wasn’t thrilled about attending this performance.  It brought back memories of the last time I was there.  Just before his death, my Granddad seemed to have shrunk.  He looked skinny and weak and miserable.  I am not sure he recognized me, but he seemed concerned about how sad I was, so with obvious difficulty, he reached out his emaciated arm to hold my hand and comfort me.

When my mom and my aunts sang at that nursing home, I realized that they were also reaching out to those that needed comfort.  Now that I was there, I recalled how often the staff at the home had mentioned to us how nice it was that my Granddad had such a steady stream of visitors—commenting that many of their other residents were not so fortunate. My relatives were lucky to inherit my Granddad’s musical talents, but that day, I was more grateful that they shared his compassion.

Feeding of the Multitude, Duc de Berry

This past fall, our stake president introduced me to a new way to look at the miracles of Jesus feeding the multitude, which I wanted to share here. The feeding of the multitude is the only miracle that is mentioned in all four gospels, and in Matthew and Mark, there are multiple versions of the miracle. It has obviously touched the hearts of the early Christians for it to be recorded so often, and is dear to us today.

To feed thousands of people to the point of being full with only a few loaves and fish is huge and with baskets of leftovers is huge. To try to figure out how you’d have to physically do that (would you re-arrange the molecules? beam extra loaves in from a hidden teleportation device?) is mind boggling. We don’t know. My stake president offered another idea.

Who was in the multitude? Probably a range of people of different socioeconomic status, families, tribes of Israel. Perhaps there were people in the crowd who had brought some extra food in their own bags. Perhaps, when the basket came around, they saw that the crowd was huge and they had a little extra, and maybe moved by the compassion and healing miracles they saw Christ demonstrate or the teachings of love and charity they heard, or the example of Christ’s examples in giving all their own bread and fish, they took from their own bags and placed their extra into the baskets.

And thousands of people were fed. And there was plenty left over.

I don’t believe that this version makes the miracle of feeding the multitudes less miraculous. It is a miracle to have power over the physical world, but I think it may be even more of a miracle to have the power to change the hearts of human beings.

Do we have extra in our bags that we can put into the baskets and share with our community? Does Christ inspire us to action?

“Then those men, when they had seen the miracle that Jesus did, said, This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world.” John 6:14

This Christmas, as we celebrate the man who changed the hearts of millions of people, let’s remember to let him change ours as well.