This past week our small town lost its only two car dealerships. Applications for free Christmas gifts for financially struggling parents to give to their children are higher than last year, as are applications for Christmas Food Baskets. Our meeting gives an office and a volunteer to the Salvation Army to help with financial emergencies and crises and the number of people through the door of the meetinghouse is increasing at an alarming rate. This is not surprising news nor is it much different than what everyone else across our country is experiencing.

The other day in a phone conversation with my mother, I asked about how they are dealing with the financial situation. I’ve been concerned about people who live on fixed incomes. While my parents are not suffering or doing without, they are being cautious about how they spend their money and how much they use from savings. My mother was surprised at how much more of their monthly income is being spent at the grocery store. As we talked about gifts for Christmas this year, my mother apologized for not “doing much for Christmas.” I was thrilled, as she knew I would be.

I admit that I’m not a Christmas person. Shopping overwhelms me, picking out a gift for someone is intimidating, and I really do not like the commercialization of the Christmas season and the incessant commercials encouraging you to buy things that aren’t necessary. I go ballistic over diamond advertisements that equate everlasting love to your spouse buying you a diamond. In my world, the language of love is my husband vacuuming the house or sweeping the floor or taking the trash out without being asked. His love is spoken through the fact that he’s hung around for 32 years in a world where many of our peers have long ago given up on marriages and commitments. I am sure there are many times when it would have been easier to have bought a diamond! I survive at this time of year on a 15 minute rule: I decorate with whatever I can put up in 15 minutes so that it can be put away in 15 minutes on the 1st of January. I waste little time on the normal trappings of the Christmas season.

And yet, the month of December is my favorite time of the year. Thirty years ago, when Ron and I lived in Western Kansas, we ended up 20 miles from other Quaker Northwesterners, Stan and Cathy Thornburg. Their friendship and the way they lived their lives were foundational to who we are today. One of the many gifts they gave us was they taught us how to make bread. That skill saved us a few years later when we moved to the middle of Sudan. In Sudan if there was bread in our diet, we had to make it. Since those early days in Western Kansas, we’ve established a tradition of baking a loaf of bread for every household in our faith community each year at Christmas. For me, the Christmas season is about baking 10 loaves of whole grain bread each day to be delivered to the homes of our faith community. We laugh that baking 10 loaves of bread each day is often easier than finding 10 people at home.

There are many things I love about bread baking season: the smell of baking bread, the cooperative work with Ron (I mix, he kneads, I bake), the opportunity to invest and give something wholesome and nutritional in a season filled with cookies and candy. In addition we have the opportunity to tell each person in our faith community, face to face, how thankful we are for their allowing us to sojourn with them. Their spiritual gifts, their gifts of service to our meeting and community and their financial sacrifices to our meeting bless us over and over and over again.

On the Sunday morning before Christmas each year, I bake over a hundred cinnamon rolls for a time of fellowship after our meeting for worship. There is little I enjoy more as I watch the faith community gather together to visit and share their lives over cinnamon rolls and coffee. As I bake, I pray that time of fellowship and communion lasts the whole year.

In these days of economic crisis and concern, I’ve been hearing people in the media talk about giving gifts this Christmas that do not last and encouraging people to spend less on “stuff” and think about giving gifts that will not end up in our landfills. While our gift of bread is meant not to last, I’ve discovered that my real hope and prayer is that it does last. Just as the gift Stan and Cathy gave us so many years ago.

Stan and Cathy’s gift of time, energy, friendship, and spiritual nurture during those six years together in Kansas made an incredible difference in our lives. They nurtured a tradition for us that reached into hundreds of homes in Kansas, Idaho, Sudan, Uganda and Indiana. Every year during this season as I bake over a hundred loaves of bread, hundreds of Health rolls, and hundreds of cinnamon rolls, I think about Stan and Cathy. Across the miles and the years I still feel connected to them in a special way and I thank God for their lives, their ministry and their influence on us. By their gift, I now have the ability and privilege to have new friends join me at the church to learn how to make bread and cinnamon rolls. I am able to give a gift that nourishes their families and their lives and to give them a gift that will hopefully keep giving for many more years to come.

As I watch the secular world try to cope with economic difficulties and try to rephrase this Christmas season away from the materialism and consumerism that has for so long dominated this season, I believe this economic crisis can become an opportunity. An opportunity for a consumer oriented society to reconnect the Christmas season with God’s spirit and God’s gift to our world: the Christ child born in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. An opportunity for our material minded culture to reconnect with our earth and the gift of sun and soil, toil and labor, and daily bread; an opportunity to nurture friendship and fellowship and to invest in spiritual nurture; an opportunity to encourage lifestyles that promote health and an opportunity to live lives full of meaning and purpose in a world were people long to make a difference.

Is this only an economic crisis on our hands? I don’t think so…….