For years I maintained that my all-time favorite Christmas gift was one given me by my older sister Connie when I was maybe seven or eight years old. It was a Playmobile, and for a little boy who loved cars it was an incredible gift. It closely resembled a 1/5-scale car dashboard with motorized headlights, windshield wipers, turn signals and horn. I had hit the Christmas jackpot, and played with it for months.
It was part of a pattern of gift-giving by our sister Connie; as a teenager she drove a school bus and later worked at Innes Street Drug Store in Salisbury, and on nearly every payday she would buy a gift for younger sister Pam and me. She would fix us vanilla Cokes at the soda fountain in the drug store, and usually just pamper us as only an older sister can.
Though the Playmobile was my prized possession for awhile, today I can’t even recall what happened to it. Looking back with the advantage of insight and perspective, I realize the favorite Christmas gift wasn’t a Playmobile, but 
Connie. I had the often overlooked and underappreciated gift of growing up with siblings who were quite close and with whom we could share love and life. All that time, Connie, along with Henry and Pam, were the real gifts in my life, at Christmas and always.
As the church moves into Advent and as culture transitions into Christmas, I hope we will remember — with each present we may receive — that the person giving it is the real gift. And in a larger sense, one that we almost miss amid all the sensory overload, the person of Jesus is, of course, the gift of Christmas — given by a heavenly Father who could hardly wait to bestow upon earth the most valuable, necessary, and desired gift his human children could ever conceive. It’s the person who is always the gift.
