I was fortunate to be raised in a family that celebrated Christmas well.  And I have always tried to make sure that Christmas was special to my own family, too.  I was exceptionally lucky, for a lifetime military man, for out of the 46 Christmases since I left home, I have only had six that were not with my parents or my family.  Only four when I was not with my wife and kids.  Of course, some of those Christmases I count as being home were interrupted by travel, other duties, and in one case when I was pulled away from Christmas dinner to go perform Courtesy Patrol.  But early on in my career I decided that Christmas was important enough to us that we would protect it by taking a short leave each year, and each October after that we put the papers in for holiday leave.  Some people gave me a hard time because, as many of you know, the military tradionally schedules lots of time off during the holidays.  But free time or not, I wanted to ensure I was home when I could be.
We celebrate tradional Christmas in our home every year.  Many years ago, when our children were very young, and some weren't even around yet, we  talked about the importance of creating family traditions that children understand and feel connected to.  So we have tried to celebrate in the same way each year;  we have several little things we do, and periodically we find something new we like and include it in our list.  And since our 43 Christmases together as a family have been celebrated in 13 different houses (the last 18 in the same house, since I am no longer a wanderer), these traditions gave us a stability and continuity that our surroundings didn't always provide.
Some of the traditions that we are most fond of include a little felt star my wife made from a pattern she found in a book.  Our tradition has been that daddy lifts the youngest member of the family up to put the little star on top of the tree (well, it was until the youngest turned 16 and got tired of me picking her up, and now MamaCharlie is the youngest in our empty nest).  In 1976, during the bicentenial, we added two small US flags to the top of our tree, they have been there every year since.  And every year we buy a new ornament for the tree.  
I think that the favorite tradition in our home is the Christmas Eve dinner.  We try to capture the mood of Christmas Eve by remembering what conditions were really like for Mary and Joseph.  We put together the kind of foods that might have been available to them that night.  Over the years, there have been some substitutions made because we don't like lamb and they wouldn't have eaten ham, but the spirit of the meal is simplicity and includes lots of finger foods, making pita sandwiches with nuts, cheese, fruits, olives, veggies, dates, figs, and such.  When we were traveling over the holidays a few years ago, the kids unanimously agreed that the Christmas Eve dinner was the thing they missed the most.  
During my Christmases away from family, I knew those emblems and traditions were important to me; they served as a great comfort.
December 16th, 1990, I herded my soldiers onto buses at Flak Kaserne and we headed out to Saudi Arabia.  We arrived early in the morning of the 17th and began our DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM experience.  By the 23rd, we had received our trucks at the port, staged, inspected, drilled and moved out to our own little spot of desert, some 400 miles from the Port.  Most of the 23rd was spent setting up our new homes and meeting our new neighbors.  The morning of the 24th, my commander and I set out to find what we could of our support system.  We'd had a meeting that morning with the company leadership and had divided up assignments, finding supply sources, food issue points, water point, etc.  We teamed up and set out.  Half way throught the day, we realized it was Christmas Eve and even though we were sure the majority of the married soldiers had held their Christmas before we left Germany, we were also aware that for many new soldiers this was their first Christmas away from home.  Thanks to the kindness of some ladies we met at an Air Force Aid station (they had already been there for a couple of months and had amassed a huge tent full of "To Any GI..." boxes.  They were full of candies and cookies and combs and soap and toothpaste and Kool-aid and all kinds of stuff.  Each box was about a three foot cube and they had dozens of them.  They were pleased that we agreed to take some of them since there were about ten people assigned to that Aid Station and they kept getting more of the boxes every week.  We were glad to take them.) We were able to put together "care packages" for each of the platoons and kept it fairly well under wraps until the next morning.  Christmas morning I loaded up my Blazer with the packages and began my rounds, Ho-ho-hoing, to the platoons' tents.  These tents were pretty austere.  It was our second day in the camp: no flooring, dust blowing constantly, the bedrock  so close to the surface that we had to use three times as many tent stakes as normal and some of them still blew down.  It was bitter cold and many of the tents didn't have working heaters, no water for bathing, no showers even if we had had water.  I won't bore you with the details of our other...facilities...well, as I said...austere.  But in the midst of all this austerity, among almost two hundred soldiers who were trained experts on managing to live in the forests of Germany (but not quite up to speed in this desert) in the midst of what I am sure were the worst conditions that many of them had ever seen...there wasn't one tent in the entire compound that didn't have some sort of effort at decoration for Christmas.  There wasn't one tent where our meager efforts to bring a bit of Christmas to them wasn't met with great surprise and joy...and more than a tear or two.  That morning, I was reminded of how important a holiday Christmas is.
 Over the years, I have heard criticism that we are too caught up in the pagan practices, that Christmas is too "commercialized",  that these things detract from the true meaning of Christmas.  But that Christmas morning, I knew that the decorations cut from MRE wrappers and trees made from who knows what (there wasn't a tree within 50 miles of us) were not a threat to Christianity...they were symbols of families, homes where Christian families taught their children the story of the Christ child. Whether they were active members of any church or not, these simple little attempts to recreate the traditions of their lifetimes were a connection to their far off families, and their Christmases.  And in that land where teaching the story of Christ is illegal...and the Bible outlawed, I saw one heck of a lot of Bibles in evidence...open or not, read or not, they were there providing another link, another comfort.

Traditions comfort us, they give us a connection to loved ones near and far, they teach us, and they bring us joy.  What could be better than that?  If you are teaching the life of the Savior in your home, if you are bearing your testimony to your children, if you go to church and you live like you believe it all...then the fun traditions of Christmas are no threat to Christianity.  If the only time your kids hear about Christ is in the ramp- up to Christmas...you have a bigger problem than commercials can cause. I don't want to take the Christ out of Christmas;  I just don't want to take the fun out of it, either.