The Christmas Spirit: Memories of Family, Friends, and Faith - Hardcover

9781439198339: The Christmas Spirit: Memories of Family, Friends, and Faith
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For many, the Christmas season can be filled with distractions and anxiety rather than the joy and peace it is supposed to bring. In The Christmas Spirit, his first holiday book, Joel Osteen offers uplifting and inspiring stories of family and friends celebrating Christmas traditions that will help readers return to the essence of the holiday by practicing the principles taught by our Savior, Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate that day. With these stories, Joel reminds us all of what is truly important in life. Filled with humorous and compelling holiday memories from Joel’s family and friends, this heartwarming collection will inspire and amuse readers while enhancing their faith in God’s goodness and eternal wisdom.

The stories in The Christmas Spirit reflect that this Christian holiday is a celebration of family: God’s family, our own, and the diverse global family. Friends and families from near and far share faith and Christmas traditions: They laugh together. They grieve together. They support each other. They offer proof that the best way to overcome hurt and loneliness is to reach out to others who may be hurting and lonely, too.

Joel’s unique stories and memories will encourage readers to savor their own Christmas memories, to share them with loved ones, and to create new memories and traditions that will be passed down for generations to come. For those feeling stressed, hurt, or lacking direction this holiday season, these heartwarming stories will serve as a healing balm and a guiding light to a more hopeful and peaceful holiday.

Over the past decade, Joel Osteen has been called the Most Influential Christian in America by numerous publications and, in 2006, was named one of Barbara Walters’s Most Fascinating People.

Hailed as “America’s voice of hope,” Joel Osteen is one of the most respected pastors in America. Each week 43,000 people attend his worship services at Lakewood Church in Houston, and his weekly inspirational program is seen by more than 7 million television viewers across America, along with tens of millions more in 200 nations throughout the world. This new book of stories from family and friends about Christmas will be cherished by readers everywhere.

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About the Author:
Joel Osteen is the senior pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. Listed by several sources as America's largest and fastest-growing congregation, Lakewood Church has approximately 45,000 adult attendees every week. Millions more watch Joel's messages as they are broadcast on national and international television networks. Joel is the author of numerous journals, devotionals, and books, including the Hope for Today Bible and the bestseller, It's Your Time. His book Become a Better You has sold over two million copies to date, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for five months. Visit Joel's website at www.joelosteen.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER ONE
Our Father’s Gift

We enjoyed the usual Christmas traditions growing up, but like most families, we had our own unique holiday rituals. The Osteen kids, all five of us, slept under and around the Christmas tree on the night before Christmas, telling stories and laughing and trying to guess what gifts we might be getting until we’d finally fall asleep. Still, we celebrated Christmas Day a bit differently from many families. For us it was really a big birthday party because my father and mother emphasized the holiday’s Christian origins as the birthday of baby Jesus, God’s perfect present to us. If ever there were a gift that keeps on giving, it was this one.

We did exchange Christmas gifts like most families. We laughed and carried on through huge dinners of turkey and all the fixings. One thing we didn’t do, though, was eggnog. Instead, real early Christmas morning while our parents were still nestled all snug in their bed, the Osteen boys and girls climbed out of our sleeping bags and made home brew—coffee, that is. I probably should explain to you first off that caffeine runs in our family’s blood. We were a coffee-drinking bunch before Starbucks ever ground its first bean. Every one of us started drinking it at a young age because of our dad, a pastor who started each day with a Bible in one hand and a mug of strong coffee in the other.

Dad’s morning coffee was his little taste of heaven on earth. Each day, he shuffled out of bed and headed to the coffee pot first thing. Before he shaved, showered, or dressed, he had to down at least one mug of good old Folgers “mountain grown, the richest kind of coffee,” as the commercials said back then.

Our father, John Osteen, didn’t just drink his morning mug of coffee; he savored it the way my wife, Victoria, relishes Godiva chocolates. For him the best part of waking up was definitely Folgers in a cup. He really made a big production of his morning coffee. I’m still not sure whether it was for his own enjoyment or for our entertainment; probably it was both.

I would sit with my older brother, Paul, and our sisters, Lisa, Tamara, and April, around the kitchen table each morning and wait for our dad to join us with his steaming mug. Watching our dad love up that very first sip of the day was a highlight of our morning, especially his first slurp. He’d put his lips to the cup, take a long, slow sip, and then hold the mug in the air with his eyes closed and a smile of contentment stretched across his face.

Finally, as we sat on the edge of our chairs waiting, Dad would take a deep breath, hold it, and let go a sound normally heard only from Saturday-morning cartoon characters.

Ahhhaaahaaaaaaaa!

We’d all giggle like crazy, and then each of us would take a sip of our own cups and chime in like the children’s choir:

Ahhhaaahaaaaaaaa!

Without fail, Dad made the same deeply satisfied sound after his first sip every morning. We laughed each and every time as if it were our first viewing of our father’s morning ritual. Do you know, to this day every one of John Osteen’s grown-up kids makes the same sound after our first sips of coffee each day? Some of our own kids, members of the next generation, also have adopted the Ahhhhhaaahaaaa! coffee habit handed down from their parents and grandfather.

This is of course just a small part of the legacy left by my father, who passed in 1999. You are likely aware that he founded Lakewood Church, which he and my mother, Dodie, built up from a small congregation packed into an old feed store. As we’ve grown older and become parents ourselves, my brother and sisters and I notice more and more how deeply our parents’ influence comes through in our daily lives in other ways big and small, on holidays and every day too.

Paul was talking recently about our dad and his coffee habit and how he would come to breakfast each morning in his thick terry-cloth bathrobe, shuffling along in his house slippers, hair a mess, sleepy look in his eyes. Dad would cinch that robe’s belt sash tight and way up high on his solar plexus, making him look like he weighed three hundred pounds even though he was not overweight at all.

We often teased my father about how rumpled he looked in the mornings. Paul especially enjoyed doing this, but my brother admitted awhile back that as he was walking to breakfast one recent morning, he caught sight of himself in a mirror.

“There I was, in a big old robe knotted way up high on my belly, shuffling in my house slippers and my hair a mess,” he said. “I realized I’d become our father!”

RISING ABOVE

Another Osteen family tradition handed down from our dad is at the heart of this Christmas tale. First, though, I should tell you some of my father’s history so you’ll get the full picture. Dad grew up on a farm outside Paris, Texas, back in the horse-and-buggy days. They didn’t have television with shows like American Idol back then, but they did have singing contests on the town square on Saturdays, when the farmers and their families rode into town for supplies.

My father’s sisters thought he should enter the contest when he was all of five years old. Before they took the buggy into town, they tried to fancy him up to look more like an entertainer. His thick hair wouldn’t stay combed the way they wanted, so his sister mixed in some egg whites as a down-home hair gel to do the trick.

Unfortunately, the hot Texas sun beat down on Dad’s egged head during the long ride into town. By the time he made it up on stage, the rotten-egg smell in his hair was so bad that instead of singing for the crowd, he threw up on them! Our father told us that put an end to his dreams of being a singer, and I’m pretty sure he stayed away from egg-white hair gel after that too.

In his younger days, Dad worked picking cotton on the farm owned by his father, my granddad Willis Jackson Osteen. Granddad was a successful cotton grower until the Great Depression. Like most, his family lost everything. They called themselves “dirt poor,” but they lost even their land when the banks crashed and Granddad had to give up farming. He didn’t give up on life, though.

Through his friendships with other farmers, he was able to gather fresh produce, load it into his old open-sided truck, and drive into Fort Worth and Dallas, where he sold homegrown vegetables on the streets in wealthy neighborhoods. Still, times were hard, and Dad and his two brothers and two sisters didn’t have much, growing up. My father often talked about going to bed hungry, having to put water on his breakfast cereal because there was no money for milk, putting cardboard in his shoes to cover the holes in the soles, and wearing hand-me-down clothes and pants that were too short.

BICYCLES FOR TWO

Despite the hard times, Dad had a mostly happy childhood. His family home had no electricity for the longest time, but they made the best of it. They’d sit on the porch, and Granddad would play the fiddle and make up songs. One time when my father was a boy, his sister Mary was holding him as they listened to music by the fire. She lost her grip, and he fell into the fire, injuring his fingers so they were scarred for the rest of his life. Music didn’t seem to be a very healthy thing for my father as much as he enjoyed it.

Dad often talked about the fact that around the holidays his family was one of those to rely on charity baskets for Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. Most of the time, he and his brothers and sisters didn’t receive Christmas presents. I think that’s why my father later on took so much pleasure in buying us gifts himself. Growing up, we didn’t hear a lot about Santa Claus. In part, I think my mother and father wanted us to stay focused on the Christian meaning of the holiday, but it also may have been that my father wanted to be the one to give us Christmas gifts because he received so few as a child.

Most parents sneak around quietly and buy Christmas presents, hide them, and then on Christmas morning tell the kids that Santa brought them down the chimney. Our father often took each of us Christmas shopping one at a time so we could help him pick out gifts for our mother and the other kids. It was funny; we were like Dad’s little helpers on those shopping trips, but he never would allow us to carry the packages. He took so much joy in buying them that I think he just wanted to savor the feeling of carrying them to the car and into the house. Maybe that, or he was afraid we’d peek!

Early one December when I was about eight years old, Dad took me and April, who is two years younger, to look at bicycles. We didn’t buy anything, and our father didn’t say that day even who we were shopping for; we just looked at bikes together. A few days later, Dad pulled me aside and told me that he’d bought April a bike. I was really excited for her, so he took me out to the back patio where he’d hidden her new bike under a bedsheet. I wanted to look at it, but my father told me not to lift the sheet.

I was so thrilled for April, I went back every couple of days just to make sure her bike was still there. I asked Dad a few times if I could see it, but he’d say: “No, it’s a surprise. You have to wait until Christmas.”

I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t let me see the bike, but I never lifted the sheet. I managed to stave off temptation, though I did keep an eye on the back patio to make sure April didn’t wander out there.

The night before Christmas all the kids slept in the den around the Christmas tree as usual. When we woke up around seven, Lisa put the coffee on so we could each have a little sip. Then our mother and father joined us, and once we’d all had our Christmas coffee and done the day’s Ahhhhh...

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  • PublisherHoward Books
  • Publication date2010
  • ISBN 10 1439198330
  • ISBN 13 9781439198339
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages160
  • Rating

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