The Pastor’s Family and Christmas Traditions

I’ve always loved the Christmas season. As a girl, I looked forward each December to hearing bedtime stories about past Christmases, baking cookies, gathering as a family around the Advent candles on Sunday nights, and going to my grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve. These family traditions birthed some of my favorite childhood memories—memories rich with good smells and warm feelings.

More than that, they helped build a sense of family identity and togetherness. Repeating them each year, my parents communicated to my siblings and me:

We are family. This is what we do. 

Traditions give children a sense of security and safety, and as a parent, I want them for my own family. As a pastor’s wife, I can feel torn when choosing between family activities and the church calendar. There’s only so much time. I’m learning to embrace that church life shapes many of our family rhythms, including those surrounding Christmas.

Church Life Shapes a Pastor’s Family Rhythms

Whether we’re talking about a week or a month at a time, church life shapes the rhythms of a pastor’s family. Sundays are corporate worship. Small groups, discipleship, counseling, and other meetings happen on other days. Community outreach has its place on the calendar. Then, there are special events and service projects.

I assume my husband Scott is involved with pretty much every key church event. At times, I’ve resented our full calendar. Personally, I prefer some wiggle room both for rest and spontaneity. Over time, though, the Lord has helped me see my husband’s role and responsibilities as one big “get-to” for our family.

Our whole family gets to be part of what God’s doing in and through our church. Even if Scott weren’t on staff, we’d want to be active in church life, growing personally and serving others (Hebrews 10:24-25). Because he is, we have even more opportunities to do these things. That’s why when Scott and I sit down to plan, we add church things first. Then, we block off date nights, family nights, and our children’s activities.

So when December rolls around, and we want to build family memories, we sometimes have fewer time windows leading up to Christmas for non-church activities. While we still want to make time for things that are just “us,” we must prioritize them. At the same time, instead of feeling frustrated that we can’t do more on our own time, we try to enjoy how and when church life overlaps with family life and becomes part of our traditions. It helps that at home and in church, we value the same things, including mission, wonder, and generosity.

A Christian Christmas: Mission, Wonder, and Generosity

Without getting into the historical origins of how we celebrate Christmas with all the trimmings in the United States, there’s a lot attached to the holiday that doesn’t have anything to do with Jesus’s birth. For Christians, though, both at home and at church, the celebration of the incarnation is central:

“Though [Jesus] was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8).

It’s only because Jesus, being God, was “born in the likeness of men” that we experience the hope of the gospel. It’s this mission—God’s mission to rescue and redeem his people—that is at the heart of a Christian celebration of Christmas, and the Advent season offers a marvelous opportunity to wonder at God’s generosity and extend it to others:

• Mission is why a church packs boxes for Operation Christmas Child and hosts a living Nativity or Christmas concert. Mission is why people sing Christmas carols in nursing homes and bake cookies for neighbors. We want people to experience God’s lavish love and come to know him. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
• Wonder stirs in our hearts when we slow down and ponder what God has given us in Jesus. That’s why our family reads Christmas devotionals around the dinner table in December. It’s why we drive around town in our pajamas, looking at homes decked with twinkling lights shining in the darkness. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
• God’s generosity is on display in the gift of Jesus and the gospel (Ephesians 1:7-10), and it invites us to be lavish toward others (Matthew 18:32-33). It leads us to extend kindness and give gifts to the poor. Especially this time of year, generosity expresses itself in hospitality, even feasting and celebrating with our families.

These are all wonderful values to incorporate into our traditions, but just as traditions themselves look different from family to family, so they will for each pastor’s family.

A Pastor’s Christmas Eve

My husband Scott is a pastor’s son, and his traditions looked different than mine growing up. While I ate supper at my grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve, his family often grabbed a bite at a restaurant before his dad preached multiple worship services. Some years, international students were at the house since Scott’s family lived in a college town, and those students usually didn’t travel home for Christmas. There would be time to visit with extended family in coming days, but Christmas Eve was all about mission, wonder, and generosity for Scott’s family.

As we build our own family traditions, Scott and I take pieces of his and mine. On Christmas Eve, I often drop Scott off at church to get ready for the service while I run to pick up fast food for all of us to eat before everything begins. We worship with our church family and are among the last people to leave the building. Then we drive through a gloriously bright neighborhood lined with luminary candles on the way to my parents’ home, where we relive my childhood and connect with extended family. All these things tell our children:

We are a pastor’s family. This is what we do. And it’s good. 

©2023 Katie Faris. Used with permission.