Each year there is a moment when Christmas arrives. It doesn’t arrive before Halloween when some stores start putting out their Christmas stuff.

It doesn’t happen when the panic hits that old Cousin George will be here for Christmas, too, and you have no bed for him — much less a present or a stocking.

It hasn’t even happened (usually) when you get all the gifts home and wrapped and even dispersed to wherever they are supposed to go.

Christmas isn’t here just because you can’t listen to any radio station without hearing Christmas carols or parodies of Christmas songs.

Sometimes Christmas hasn’t even arrived after the wrapping paper fight after the kids unwrap their gifts and/or demolish the candy bowl — which, of course, also demolishes their appetite for that huge Christmas dinner which you felt obligated to eat (and wouldn’t have missed even if you didn’t feel obligated).

No… These things may happen around the holidays but…

Christmas arrives when you share with someone else the honest feelings in your heart of love and caring about that person. The example for caring and giving above and beyond all logic and reason was given to us about 2000 years ago when God sent His only Son, a part of Himself, to bring us the joy of a tiny baby, an example of how to live, and a gift of life forever with Him, if we choose to accept it.

Christmas is here when it arrives in your heart.