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As Christians, we love talking about those big supernatural miracles that God performs. But we also love talking about how God works and performs miracles even in the ordinary things in life. And to steal some words from Martin Luther, this is most certainly true—especially when it comes to just putting on a Christmas dinner.
The High-Stakes Performance of Christmas Past
The other day, while making some homemade sourdough pizza crust, I burned my hand really, really bad. I pulled out a cast iron skillet from a 500-degree oven, and then just without thinking as I'm doing things with the pizza, I went to turn the skillet without remembering to grab the hot pad.
So it takes me back to this question: how did they do this stuff so many years ago?
I actually found an article that gave some detail as to what it really entailed like 200 years ago to simply put on Christmas dinner. And it was absolutely fascinating. This comes from Mark McDermott at Genealogy Explained—I'm totally crediting him with this research. It's Christmas plagiarism. It's for baby Jesus, so it's okay.
Before we get into this, we have to take away the mega stores where we go and buy everything one-stop shopping and load up in bulk. We have to take away refrigeration. We have to take away the convenience of microwaves and ovens. And the dishwasher—because all that goes out the window when we backtrack through time. No running water. No thermometers. No timers. No nothing.
I remember being maybe 13 when we got our first microwave. We thought we were astronauts. It was the size of a small car. It was literally like a console we put up on the counter. Dad said, "That's not going to work," so he went out and got a cart for it. It had its own cart. It was special. There were dials that we used back then. You could roast a baked potato in like a minute and a half. They don't make them that strong anymore—maybe radiation is partly the reason I am the way I am.
Those early microwaves could explain a lot.
But maybe part of the theme here is that we take for granted everything that we have. Technology has come such a long way even in our lifetime. Going back to business class as a junior in high school, they took us to the bank on a field trip. We were talking to someone in California, they were writing names down, one student gave a code word, and then all of a sudden we turned to this machine and it printed out a piece of paper with everything we had just talked about. This new-fangled thing called the facsimile. Did we think we were something. It was like the Clampetts had shown up.
When you take that into consideration with 200 years of cooking and preparing a meal, I think we completely forget what it was really like.
I loved how Mark McDermott describes it. He describes putting on a Christmas dinner basically as a high-stakes performance. Because people saved all year for it. It was not a cheap thing. They worked all year for it. And the execution required skill, strength, endurance, and what I consider a little bit of Christmas miracle.
Fire Before Dawn
Christmas dinner started really early. Things were cooked over a flame in the fireplace. And so those fires had to get started. The eldest of the house would get up usually before 5:00 a.m. and start stoking all those fireplaces. This was the coldest part of the day, but it was also still dark. Imagine just getting your wood ready by candlelight. You can see your breath. It's cold.
So there was no sleeping in on Christmas Day.
And one fire was not enough. You needed the big hearth fire which was in the main part of the house, but then you needed small fires as well for pies and puddings and side dishes. The big piece of meat was roasted in the big hearth. The smaller fires were for smaller dishes. And then other fires in other rooms where people would be gathering.
The meals were not necessarily cooked over the fire itself but over coals. And so it took some time for the fire to burn and produce a nice bed of coals. It sometimes took like a couple hours in order for those coals to be ready to start actually roasting food.
The Six-Hour Figgy Pudding
One of the big dishes that has been carried down from generation to generation—we hear about it all the time—figgy pudding. In Prep and Landing (if you've never seen it, watch the original first, but they have three of them), when things go bad, the head of Santa's elves calls for figgy pudding. That means abort the mission.
Christmas pudding, it's also known as. Listen to what the ingredients were: suet, flour, raisins, and brandy. And it was all tied up and boiled in a cloth bag.
Guess how long it took to boil that figgy pudding? Six hours. That's right. Six hours it took to make one. And they weren't that large.
It sounds kind of disgusting, boiling it in a cloth bag. But it would boil for six hours. That took place in the laundry room because it's being boiled in water. Wherever they did the laundry, that's where they made the figgy pudding. Or outside in the garden, because you couldn't have that boiling water inside the house. That would be very, very bad because there wasn't really exactly ventilation.
But think about this: if at any point that water stopped boiling over six hours, it would ruin it. It would just become like soup. So you had to keep adding water so that the water didn't all evaporate, but you couldn't add the water so as to quell the boiling. It was really a touch-and-go thing there. A lot of attention.
That's a tap dance that has dad hollering at you all over it. Not too much water. You got to give it enough. Feed the boil. Not too much.
Preparing the Ingredients
Let's back up to when we were actually preparing it. So it's not just that the ingredients aren't at the grocery store all prepared. It's the fact that you have to have a skill set along with this, with some intentionality and a little bit of precision, or you would ruin the dish. And muscles. This took skill and it took some strength too.
The Suet
The suet is fat from a cow, but it's very specific fat. You can't just use anything. It's the fat that's around the kidneys of the cow that was harvested and then a nice little membrane put over it to preserve it.
So the cook would get this chunk of suet—nothing says hunger like kidney fat, right?—and they would have to pick off the membrane by hand. Then they had to cut the suet up into little teeny tiny tiny pieces. If they didn't cut it up small enough, when it would start to cook, it wouldn't blend all together and then you'd end up with just this brick.
You know what it's like to cut cold fat. That's not an easy job. There was a lot of work just cutting up the tiny pieces, picking off the membrane, and getting the suet ready.
I can't even hardly knead bread like my grandma used to do. One time I came home out of breath from kneading bread for 10 minutes. Like two minutes in I'm thinking, "Wait, I got eight minutes left to go here."
Get in a time machine 200 years ago? Oh no. This just isn't going to do.
The Raisins
Back then, there was no stainless steel jungle that these little fruits went through that removed the grape seeds. They had to be removed by hand. And each grape has, as you know, several seeds in it. So you had to make sure you got all of them out. And it took hundreds of these little buggers to make the figgy pudding.
This is not a hard thing to do, but it's very tedious and it took a long time. Usually it was the kids or the very lowest member of the kitchen staff that was put in charge of it. It was called stoning the raisins.
It looks adorable in the pictures, but after about 20 of them...
But the celebration was such a big deal that everybody joyfully did their part. That's what I read in the accounts—everybody joyfully did their part.
That's what makes it exciting to hear this story and that's what I hope for everybody's family on Christmas. Our traditions of doing fondue on Christmas Eve was joyful because it was the one time a year that all the kids pitched in with smiles on their face and there was joy and there was happiness. It was the feast of the year. We had so much left over that the Christmas Day tradition was to do a stir fry and again same thing—kids all asking "Can I do the dishes? Can I help? Can I cut this?"
Funny how focusing on the Lord can just make everybody happy and make the burden of the day, the chore of the day, fun and exciting.
"Can I stone the raisins? I want to stone the raisins."
The Sweeteners
You had to think ahead as well because sugar was not always in supply. What was in supply—syrups and molasses and stuff like that—they usually would have in jars in the pantry. But again, it's cold. You ever try to work with cold syrup or cold molasses? It's like cement. It's like epoxy.
So you have to pull out those jars. You have to set them close enough to the fire to get warm, not so close that they get hot. You had to warm up those molasses jars before you could use them as well.
The Meat of the Matter
No refrigeration, right? Everything is preserved, which means you have been working at all of this for months and months and months. It didn't just happen. You don't just make a grocery list and go to the store. So you either harvested from your garden and put in storage, or it was stuff that was alive at the moment. That's what you ate.
The butcher could butcher it that morning or they could hang the animal in the cold for several days. But there was a risk—as that meat aged and got a little more tender, if temperatures unexpectedly rose, that meat could very, very easily go bad. You didn't want that to happen, especially when you're saving up your pennies to just buy a Christmas goose, governor.
Root cellars where the vegetables and stuff were stored—if the weather got out of whack, it was not unheard of for those cellars to either freeze or flood. Anytime unusual weather happened, there was always a high potential for spoilage and that would mean there were no vegetables or no this or that for your Christmas dinner.
Pork and Goose
Pork was actually a much more prominent meat for Christmas than it is today because fall was swine butchering time of year. So it was pretty fresh and much more common.
But the goose was the fowl of choice because they were bigger than the average chickens. There was really a feast orientation—much more to eat. And also they did not cost as much as a turkey.
In Victorian England, turkeys were pretty rare. They could cost as much as a week's salary for the average person.
Is that why the prize turkey in the storefront during A Christmas Carol is such a poignant thing to that audience? Yes. And it had that era about it my whole life. But then when you find out turkeys were really spendy at that time—it wasn't the average week's salary for Bob Cratchit. It was the average week's salary for Mr. Scrooge. It was very, very expensive.
The biggest turkey that hadn't sold, still in the butcher shop—that's a big crescendo moment to show that Scrooge is going to keep Christmas well. He was exceedingly generous in that one act. And as strong as that would have been to the original audience, do you see how it kind of fades a little bit with time? It still holds its value, but it does fade a little in how much of a boom that really would have been once you realize how expensive turkeys were. It was more than just a better cut of meat. It was a Christmas miracle for the Cratchits to have a turkey on their Christmas dinner table.
Goose Clubs
Because the goose wasn't cheap either, they actually had what were called goose clubs. You just had to toot on down to your local pub. At the pubs, you could put pennies in throughout the months leading up or throughout the year. And then that's how you would save up money to buy a Christmas goose.
They didn't do it through the banks because the average person or the poor person didn't have an account at the bank. So they would take it to their pub and put it in a little savings account there. That way you were also less apt to dip into it when resources were really scarce. It would have been really easy to say, "Well, let's just use that instead of saving it for that goose on Christmas."
Goose clubs were a thing in the pubs of England.
Across the Pond
In the US, the wild goose was plentiful. But it was wild. It wasn't at the butcher shop. So they would go out hunting them. They would also have venison and oftentimes raccoon for Christmas in the early pilgrim, early colony Christmases.
The problem was because they were wild, they had to have a little extra TLC to make that meat not so gamey, not so tough, and taste comparable to the store counterparts bought in Victorian England. You had to go out and either hunt that wild bird that morning or hunt it ahead of time and then hang it to age—and again, you always run the risk of spoilage.
The Pheasant Test
With pheasant, there was some skill involved to determine if it had aged properly. Here's the rule of thumb: if you could pull the tail feathers of the pheasant out real easily, if they just kind of came out real easy, you were good. The meat was ready to be cooked or roasted and you didn't want it to age any further.
Oftentimes they would just let them hang until the body of the bird fell away from the head. They hung them up by the neck. You had to check on them every single day. The line is probably pretty fine without refrigeration to when the bird goes bad.
What if they were about to go bad and you saw it and you were still two days from Christmas? Your timing was off then. Maybe they cooked it early somehow. Who knows? But this is how delicate of a thing this was.
The Veteran Schnoz
Your nose was really the only quality control they had in order to determine whether it had aged properly or if it was spoiled, whether it had cooked properly or it was still underdone. Your nose was what you used to determine those things.
So it helped to have a very veteran schnoz in the house. It was a skilled thing to be able to do the Christmas dinner.
I'm putting that on a resume under special skills. Veteran schnoz.
Our very first Thanksgiving—we were living in Germany and one day the announcement came: "Oh, by the way, we're going over to our friends Randy and Petra's house and you're going to bring the turkey."
"What?"
"Well, I just volunteered you because I was in the boat."
"I had never made a turkey before."
"Well, you're a country girl. I figured this was second nature for you."
"I was never in charge. I was stoning the raisins."
I didn't know that's all you could do.
It turned out okay. That's a whole other story. Was that the time we left the neck and stuff inside the bird? The little bag of gizzards was still in there. Our friend from Hispanic descent from the LA area had married a German girl, and we were in a German house. They must have thought that was the American tradition or something.
The man of the household was cutting it up and serving it, and he's like, "What is this?" He showed me and I'm like, "Oh dear. That's not supposed to be there. Sorry about that. Let's just throw it away."
But that German family loved the dressing inside the bird. They loved it. "What is this? What is this? This is delicious."
The Dangerous Work of Preparation
Have you ever plucked or cleaned a goose? Because that was the meat of choice. It is messy. It is stinky. It is dangerous work because you are dealing with huge pots of boiling water. Getting burned or scalded was a real possibility. And it could actually take up to two to three hours just to clean that giant bird.
Even if you got a goose, you still had a lot of work ahead of you.
Roasting on the Spit
These birds were roasted on a spit. These were amazing things, and it was not easy. Someone had to turn that spit constantly—like turn it every couple minutes for the entire duration of the roasting, which was about three to four hours depending on how big the bird was.
And they did not have clocks or a watch back then. They had to use the veteran schnoz.
Some people rigged up a pulley system. That was high-techy back in those days versus just doing it by hand with a little crank. It was much easier with the pulley system. It gave you a little bit more leverage and it wasn't so difficult to move that big bird or that big piece of meat.
They didn't roast it right over the fire. Like I said before, they roasted it over coals. And you had to keep those coals at a consistent heat. You didn't want it to be too hot or it would burn on the outside. You didn't want those coals to be not hot enough because then your bird was not going to get done.
Underneath they would put a little dish to catch all the drippings. And don't forget—that bird has to be basted like every 15 minutes.
McDermott's description of a high-stakes performance—every single dish. That's exactly what it was. It took some know-how. It took some patience and endurance. And some intuition as to knowing "Yeah, it's done" or "No, it's not. It needs to go a little bit more."
Dutch Ovens and Christmas Trees
Christmas trees were a fairly new thing back then. They weren't all over in every house. Most of them were very small, just like the tip of the tree or whatever. But they were used basically as a serving tray. If someone had them in their house, they would hang the fruits and the nuts and the candies on the tree. When Christmas Day rolled around, they kind of grazed off the tree eating all of those lovely snacks.
The Dutch oven came into play because you're roasting your animal, but then all the other baked goods you did in Dutch ovens. This is a whole different method. The doughs were prepared and then placed in these Dutch ovens and then submerged and just covered all around with coals on the sides, on the top, on the bottom.
Again—not too many coals because you didn't want it too hot to burn. Not too few coals because it would never cook all the way through.
These covered cast iron Dutch ovens, once there was food in them, they could easily weigh up to 40 to 50 pounds. So I'm thinking about myself burning my hand with my little skillet in the oven. Maneuvering a 40 to 50 pound iron Dutch oven? This is dangerous work.
And you know, that iron skillet pizza—you had to do the crust first and then put the toppings in. It does take so much work compared to just popping in a frozen pizza or picking up the phone and saying "Hey, I'll meet you at my door in 30 minutes." But it's worth it. Totally worth it.
That's where the spirit of this whole story comes from. The iron skillet fought back a little, and now you're thinking of these ladies that all had long dresses and all the danger of everything going on. You're like, "Wow, they did a lot."
Exactly. Think about it. They're doing all this work in a long dress. Catching fire was kind of a common thing back then.
The Two O'Clock Miracle
The Christmas dinner was actually served around 2:00 in the afternoon. Why? Because it was virtually impossible to get a meal on before then.
And then to get everything timed and set on the table at the exact same time? It was kind of a miracle.
After the meal was done, you had cleanup, and the sun's going down. You wanted to make sure you had plenty of daylight to do the vast majority of the cleanup. It often took a lot of hours and it was very, very common to be doing those dishes and washing up those greasy pots by candlelight, in basins of carried water, again heated by another fire.
So they're on their feet from literally 5:00 a.m. until way late. By the time they're serving dinner at 2:00, whoever the head mistress or the wife of the house was, she has been on her feet for nine-plus hours doing pretty heavy-duty work. And it was going to go on until the late hours of the night as well.
I tell you all of this to say: bringing the fires and the coals in different rooms to different temperatures, needing pretty constant supervision, without any modern conveniences at all, getting it all done and on the table at the exact same time—this was indeed what I consider a Christmas miracle.
The fact that God enabled us to do that, and technology had come a ways at that point in history... wow.
Efforts Equal Results
The phrase that comes to mind is: efforts equal results. When you put in the effort—there's times I want to do what I call putting my master chef on and really going for it. Sometimes I don't even care about eating the food. It's the journey of preparing it that has been so much fun. Trying to show attention to detail, trying to get those things to come out just the way they are. When they do, eating it is just another step in the journey.
So many times cooking is in the way of the feeding. We just want to eat. That's why Pop-Tarts became a thing. Convenience, convenience, convenience.
One of the biggest fights we had when we were first married—I was living as a single man on things like Banquet Chicken and cases of Pepsi. And Pepsi in her world was for holidays only. And Banquet Chicken was an affront to chicken.
It wasn't really food. You could call it that if you wanted to, but really it was just entertainment for your mouth. It wasn't nutritious.
One time we were in the dairy aisle and came across American cheese food. They had to put the word "food" right on the package. Either that or is this what they feed the cheese?
We were young. You look back at the pictures, it looked like the paper boy married the Girl Scout. So young. I don't ever remember buying a jar of pickles prior to that. We would grow cucumbers and pickle every year. We bought the classic pickle jar and I remember opening it and eating it and going, "Oh, this is not going to work for me."
We had a very big pickle dilemma for about 10 years of our marriage. Even buying onions—we didn't buy onions. We'd harvest them and put them in the garage.
There's still a pickle arrogance to this day. Mount Olive. That's the brand. If I bring home something else, it's like, "What have you done? Why?"
I loved pickles so much I would drink the juice growing up. That's how much I loved it. It's full of electrolytes.
Standing there talking to her while she's in the kitchen holding a pickle jar sipping, and you really wonder: where did my life go wrong? Where did I take a wrong turn?
So many things growing up on the farm just kind of went away as an adult. As time moves forward, a lot of those traditions fall away. We don't do the figgy pudding anymore. We don't do a lot of stuff. That's not a bad thing to see go away.
The figgy pudding—they can be very, very beautiful and they can be very, very simple. The wealthy people when they would make their figgy pudding or Christmas pudding, it was just very ornate and really beautiful.
Gramster Rant: The Death of Door-to-Door Caroling
Reading an article the other day, my heart kind of sank because it was talking about all these Christmas traditions that have disappeared since like the '70s.
The Dangerous Decorations of Yesteryear
They had the aluminum Christmas tree. Remember those? They just fell out of fashion. One of those things that was funky cool for like 10 minutes and then it's just "What are you doing with an aluminum tree?" I remember my dad was very anti-aluminum Christmas tree. I was excited about it as a kid—it was probably in my school classroom. But Dad was like, "No, we're not doing that." As an adult, I understand, and I'm glad he never did. They're starting to make them again as a vintage retro thing. A lot of that junk is retro cool now.
Do you remember that tinsel that hung just so beautifully back in like the '40s and the '50s? That was made out of lead. That's why it hung so beautiful. Good for the kids. They would take the tinsel off and mom would actually iron it and store it for the next year. It was really, really beautiful. But that went away. The new stuff they make is just not the same. Kind of a mess.
Angel hair—that white wispy cloudy looking stuff. Very common in ornaments and decorations back in the day, actually before my time even. That was made out of asbestos. So that went away. No more angel hair. No more lead tinsel.
Do you know what else was going on during that time? We watched a documentary about Christmas traditions in the Americas from the late 1800s all the way through the '70s. And in the '50s, '60s, and even into the '70s before it started dying out, one of the best Christmas presents you could give to a coworker or neighbor was a carton of cigarettes.
Lucky Strike and Merry Christmas. Add a little asbestos to the festivities. "Hey Jack, here's a carton of smokes. Hey, did you get the asbestos up on your tree this year? Oh, it's looking good. Merry Christmas."
How did they survive? Oh my goodness.
The One That Broke My Heart
But here's the thing. There was one tradition on that list that when I saw it, my heart just sank.
They said that door-to-door Christmas caroling is a thing of the past. Nobody does it anymore.
I'm very, very sad. Very, very sad for the people that think that's a thing of the past and that they can't do it. But then I think about people in the bigger metro areas across the country and it's like, oh yeah, I see why you don't do that anymore. Not exactly safe to wait till after dark and then go knocking on people's doors that you don't know.
I felt really bad for people where that is no longer a thing for them. And I thought: just move to small-town America and you can do it again. Because our church ladies do it every year.
The woman who kind of coordinates it and does it every year—oh my goodness, it makes our holiday season. There are so many benefits to getting together in this holiday time and just going Christmas caroling.
Just last Sunday night with the church women, we went around to a couple places—the nursing home and other facilities. It was too cold to go door to door outside, so we went into hospitals and nursing homes and things like that. We would go door to door in the nursing home and there would be a nurse with us that would just check with the patient. "There's some ladies here caroling. Would you like them to come in?"
All of them said yes. No one said no.
One of them was somebody that couldn't have anyone in their room, but he's like, "Yeah, will they please just sing outside my door?"
It's therapy. Music is therapy.
The Health Benefits of Christmas Caroling
There are actually tangible scientific benefits—health benefits—of Christmas caroling. This isn't just sentiment.
You Feel Good
The people hearing and the people singing feel really good. We saw it firsthand in those nursing homes—the joy on faces, the connection that sparked.
A Sense of Togetherness
Not just being with others, but genuine unity and togetherness. That's a huge biblical principle. When you have that tight togetherness in a fellowship, in a family, in a church, or in any kind of gathering, something powerful happens.
That's why professional sports is so addicting. If you're hypothetically a Vikings fan, you go to the Vikings arena and everybody's got Viking purple on. You feel a togetherness with people.
Speaking of Germany—the Vikings were in the playoffs and you could only see the games in certain public places that had satellite dishes. This is back in 1987. No one was wearing jerseys to the games, but I had a Vikings jacket. There were like three pubs along the way in the town in Germany. The games were on in all three pubs and the Vikings won. They beat San Francisco, I think, and they're headed to play Washington in the NFC Championship game.
As we're filing out onto the street, it's not packed with tens and twenties of people. Just four or five, six different people. And this dude is walking towards me in a Vikings hat. And I've got my Viking jacket on. And we noticed each other about five strides away.
As we passed each other—this is one of the coolest moments of my life—without saying a word to each other, we just high-fived right in the middle of the sidewalk and just kept going. Because we'd won that game.
There's a togetherness.
And the togetherness of Christmas caroling makes a stronger, healthier bond between people. The church and your Christian brothers and sisters—that togetherness, that you're all saved in spite of yourself—it's pretty powerful.
That carries over into church when you get together and you're singing hymns together, singing Christian songs together in united worship with the praise band. It translates also into a culture where maybe they're not saved, but it's Christmas time and everybody's going to church and they've been listening—they know these Christmas songs. Even if you have a very, very secular neighbor, friend, or circle of people, those Christmas carols are still a unifying thing even with non-believers because it's part of our culture and they know the songs.
It brings people together.
Blood Circulation
The door-to-door aspect gets you outside, walking, meeting people. But then I think just the singing itself—you're breathing in deeper and breathing out longer than what you normally do in just your day-to-day conversation. That's probably really, really good for you.
If you know swimmers, swimmers take very, very deep breaths, and those deep breaths do in fact help the swimmer's health and body. Taking those deep long breaths on a regular basis is a very healthy thing.
So sing away.
Brain Health
Brain injuries and neurological illnesses can actually be eased during Christmas caroling. It can help regain speech. As people have strokes, it could be comforting for them. It works both sides of the brain. Listening and participating in caroling, even if you can't sing, you can still get a benefit from it.
Going and singing "Frosty the Snowman" versus going and singing "Away in the Manger" are two totally different things. I believe there's something spiritual about singing praise to our Lord that actually brings more healing than just jingle bells of the season.
Words have meaning and words have effect.
There's a very powerful video that went viral many years ago. There's this woman with Parkinson's in a nursing home, and she has that blank, disconnected facial expression. She's not real responsive.
All of a sudden, the caregiver who worked at the nursing home came up to her. She was actually a Jewish woman, and she knew that this woman was a Christian. So she started singing a hymn to this woman with Parkinson's.
And all of a sudden, she just started coming to life. She was connected. She started moving to the rhythm of the song, and then eventually was even singing the words along with her.
That was a powerful visual of the reality of what we're talking about—the benefits to health of not just door-to-door Christmas caroling, although that's one aspect of it, but the gift of music that God has given us.
We go way back into the book of Genesis where there were people put in charge of music. It was there from the very beginning. Just like language, just like thought, just like speech—it was all there. And it's a gift from God.
Because it's a gift from God, of course we're going to see, when it's used properly and used well to glorify God, benefit to mankind through that.
Sense of Community
That's the last benefit from the article. It creates genuine community. Not just proximity to others, but actual connection.
Final Thoughts
If you have subscribed at Fresh Road Media for free and that's the level you want to be part of our tribe, we are so glad that you are along with us.
If you have been giving financially, you have made such a difference in so many different people's lives. Just the Salvaged by God teaching platform alone has changed lives because Fresh Road Media is able to put it out there. And we can't do that at the level we're doing it without your help.
We are all volunteers. There's no paid staff at Fresh Road Media. We use the money to increase our equipment, increase our reach, increase some of our availability—because not a lot of things are free as far as we want to be organically, but some things just don't work that way.
What we're trying to do in 2026 is put together a very strong ministry, and it's going to take people just like you standing with us financially. If you say, "You know what, I'm tapped out. I've got other things that God's laying on my heart. I will just subscribe for free"—well, go ahead and do that. And if you're watching on Rumble or YouTube, throw a thumbs up on there. Like and subscribe the video or the channel—that helps us as well.
Freshroadmedia.com is where you go for all things of the outreach broadcast ministry and my teaching platform. What I've had through the "Bible Idiots" brand has moved into Salvaged by God. I'm not that great of an orator, but what I do well is I exegete the text and I tell you what God has laid on my heart. I try to take you as deep as possible and as real as possible.
And quite honestly, I don't care if your feelings get hurt. I just want you to know that there is a substitute for your sin and his name is Jesus Christ. And those of us who have accepted that, we have a great future.
So together, let's celebrate that. Learn more about him daily. In keeping with repentance, we praise the Lord.
My phrase of 2025, which I'm keeping for 2026: contentment with godliness is great gain.
So be content this holiday season. From my heart to yours, Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year.
And remember—keep Christmas all the year. Cook. Feast. Eat. Sing. Do all those things, those gifts that God has given us.
We'll see you back here next year, 2026.