The kitchen becomes my primary place of residence the week before Thanksgiving and continues straight on through New Year's Day. I should probably file a change-of-address card with the post office.

The kitchen counter is littered with crumpled dish towels, soiled hot pads and towering stacks of dirty cookie sheets and mixing bowls. Pots bubbling on the stove have all been seasoned with two shakes of harried and a dash of exhaustion. Cold dirty dishwater in the sink formed a film an hour ago.

I'm looking for something but I'm having difficulty finding it. It's not in the kitchen, that's for sure.

A top-to-bottom search of the family room turns up empty as well. It isn't dangling from any of the Christmas tree branches. It isn't wedged between Christmas sheet music in the piano bench or buried beneath the sofa cushions -- although I do find a sock, some caramel popcorn and two candy cane wrappers.

I shake a few gifts under the tree and hold them to my ear when nobody is looking. Pretty, but not what I'm looking for.

As the hunt continues, I'm feeling frustrated and flushed. I can't be the only one who thinks it's hot in here. I throw open a window and a blast of cold rushes in. The night sky is plastered with diamonds. The constellations are singing and surely the earth is trembling. The magnificence of such beauty is overwhelming. This is what I have been searching for -- wonder.

It is the jaw-dropping wonder of a night long ago. The wonder of a peasant couple taking refuge in a manger. The wonder of a young girl giving birth to the King of Kings on a stable floor strewn with straw and air filled with the stench of animal waste. It is the wonder of God stooping low, taking on humble human form, swaddled and lying in a manger.

The wonder of Christmas is not in fabulous meals, piles of gifts or dazzling decorations. It's not in parties and festivities or even in the serenade of Dickens carolers.

The wonder of Christmas is found in the sacred moments of a still and quiet heart.

May you, too, find wonder this season.

Merry Christmas.

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