A Frisbee, a Quail, and Christmas

As we get into this season, it’s natural to find ourselves reminiscing about Christmases past. When I was a young kid, my grandparents lived in Delaware, and every Christmas break we made the trip to visit them. I remember several holidays when their house was completely blanketed in snow, and one particular Christmas when they had the largest Christmas tree I had ever seen. It might have given the Griswold family tree a run for its money. “Little full… lotta sap.”

That same Christmas, my sisters and I took a break from playing in the snow and decided it would be a great idea to throw a Frisbee… inside the house. It wasn’t long before one especially ambitious throw went wildly off course and knocked one of my grandmother’s favorite porcelain quail figurines off the fireplace mantel. It hit the floor, shattered into pieces, and our childhood innocence shattered right along with it.

So what did we do? Like any kids who knew they were in trouble for doing exactly what they knew they weren’t supposed to do—we panicked. We gathered up the broken pieces, snuck outside, dug into the snow, and buried the evidence like tiny, nervous archaeologists of regret. Problem solved. Or so we thought.

It took my grandmother about 15 seconds in the room to notice that her quail was missing. “Now where did my bird go?” she asked. We suddenly became very interested in the Christmas tree. Or the ceiling. Or literally anything except eye contact. Of course, the truth eventually came out—because the truth always does. There were tears, apologies, a gentle (but firm) lesson about telling the truth, and a reminder that accidents happen… but hiding them only makes things worse.

Looking back on that moment now, I can’t help but think of Psalm 32:3–5, where the psalmist says: “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away… Then I acknowledged my sin to you… and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

There’s something deeply human about our instinct to “bury things in the snow.” We hide mistakes. We avoid hard conversations. We hope problems will just quietly disappear if we ignore them long enough. Kids do it with broken figurines. Adults do it with broken relationships, unspoken worries, and unconfessed fears.

But Christmas, at its heart, is the story of a God who refuses to let what’s broken stay buried. Instead of waiting for us to clean up our messes, God comes to us—right into the middle of them. Jesus is born not into a perfect world, but into a messy one. He comes not to scold us for the broken pieces, but to redeem and restore what we thought was beyond repair.

The good news of the season is this: we don’t have to keep burying our brokenness in the snow. We can bring it into the light. We can tell the truth. We can trust that grace is bigger than our mistakes—and that God is far more interested in restoration than in punishment. And for the record, my grandmother forgave us. The quail, sadly, did not survive. But the lesson did.

May this season be one where we stop hiding, start trusting, and remember that even our messiest moments are no match for the grace of God-with-us. And kids, don’t throw the frisbee in the house.

May God hold you,

Rev Chris Hester