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Unlike some people, my mind isn’t full of vivid memories from my childhood years. However, I recall in brilliant detail my Christmas gift from 1973 and using it for the first time. I took my “doctor bag” that I had just received, complete with a plastic stethoscope and syringe with a round and blunt tip, to the hospital to see my dad, a patient that Christmas Eve.

Going to his bedside and opening my new black plastic doctoring kit, I solemnly removed my stethoscope, and after putting one plastic earpiece and the other into my ears, I placed my hand holding my stethoscope over my dad’s chest. I remember his nose covered in white gauze piled high with surgical tape stretched from cheek to cheek. Lying quietly in his bed, donned in a white and blue flecked hospital gown, this was the first time I had seen my energetic and hardworking dad look weary or tired. 

My young and tender heart surely would have been worried if it had not been for Mom. What I  don’t remember from that evening is being sad or scared. I learned “many moons later,” as Mom used to say, that she had just gotten back the day before from a heartbreaking trip to her own mother’s funeral and that simultaneously, my dad, her husband, was fighting for his life as he lay in that hospital bed. I didn’t know how sick he was. Mom did. And she protected all four of us kids from that heavy burden. 

Mom had relatively no “backup”.  She didn’t have an extensive network of friends or family on either side or a church group rallying and praying for her through the trenches. At this point, Mom was solo parenting four grade-school-aged kids who were hungry on Christmas Eve night as we all left the hospital. As Mom retold this story to me, she said that all the food places that were options for dinner were closed for Christmas. So she drove us home.

Brave Mom. For sure she was physically and emotionally nearing empty. I can only imagine the heaviness of her heart and the weight on her mind at that point. That evening would have been the perfect time for manna to rain down from heaven! That didn’t happen, nor was a hot casserole waiting at our front door when we got home from the hospital. The pastor’s wife had brought Christmas cookies, though. To these cookies, for our Christmas Eve dinner, Mom added peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut in triangles to make our dinner extra magical. God met our needs as our tummies were filled and satisfied with bread slathered in Jiff and jam. We thoroughly enjoyed this simple and modest feast on a blanket on the floor—a “carpet picnic,” as Mom used to call it.

All grown up now, I’m reflecting on how the King of kings chose to enter this world and the humble lodging and circumstances He sovereignly picked for his own birth story on Christmas day. It actually seems quite fitting that our Christmas Eve dinner was plain old PB & J. Our meager dinner for that night seems symbolic of the lowly and inglorious way that Jesus chose to come into this world. Yes, in fact, I think a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Christmas Eve, cut into triangles and served on the floor carpet-picnic-style, is the perfect Christmas Eve meal. 

I will abundantly bless her provisions; I will satisfy her poor with bread. 
Psalm 132:15 ESV

Photo: Unsplash, Giorgio Trovato