This Christmas, All I’m Asking For Is Love

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I can picture myself lounging around our living room under the huge Christmas tree, unwrapping presents that make my heart skip a beat. RC car? Starbucks planner? Please be the new iPhone. I remember believing in Santa, too. I still do. I remember being restless on those cold December nights, agonizing as I finish my Christmas wishlist. As I heard Christmas carols being sung by kids a little younger than I was, I ceaselessly thought to myself, “What present would be the most envied this Christmas?”

The common Christmas is carefully delineated into my being — the cold breeze in harmony with our sweaters, the clamorous barter of gifts. Still, it’s dark despite the light.

As Christmas draws near again, I could still opt to go on writing what I want for the holidays into hundreds of paper sheets. However, as I age, it seems that my Christmas wishlist ages too. Not because of how consumed the paper becomes nor how repetitive it is that I want the same set of things every Christmas, but because of the decayed thought that the things on my “Christmas Wishlist” are merely things. Now, it’s kind of empty.

Because now we realize that life, as we age, is filled with material things that don’t answer the desire that our hearts long for.

What our hearts long for is love.

Love that God has given to us people to share.

The ugliest part of this feeling is it doesn’t come in ornamental gift bags or a chromatically designed wrapper. It comes from our fellow beings. It comes from our intuition.

This Christmas, I promised myself to love. To give more and more love to others, but more importantly, to myself. It is hard to look for love when we can’t even find it within.

So this Christmas, I don’t need a fancily wrapped present to make my heart rejoice. I only need the feeling of love. My “Christmas Wishlist” included this and nothing else, because that’s the way it should be. I guess those close to my heart know me and what love I crave for.

I value moments over possessions. So long as the moment isn’t dull, I don’t care what that present inside the beautiful wrapper is.

So many people will choose to stay under that Christmas tree time and again, but some will take the path less traveled. Though it means embarking on a journey of unfamiliarity, it has so much more to return. Where life gets greedy, it’s nice to take a break once in a while and see what the world has for us and maybe that time is this Christmas. Where embarking on an unfamiliar sojourn fights our curiosity, where going out of our comfort zones require us to shake off the manacle of our awful little past lived in mediocrity  — we pause for a moment. We pause for a moment and then go on to discover about what life really has for us, go on to getting what is ours, go on to chase our dream that may not be here tomorrow.

We fling ourselves to the wilderness beyond controlling what we can because after all, during Christmas, all roads lead to home.