Christmas Laundry

Christmas Laundry

Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, I will make them as white as wool.

Isaiah 1:18

Do you like doing laundry, or do you consider it more a “necessary evil” in your life? Here’s an example of an Amish wash day from years ago, and for Amish women, it hasn’t changed much.

Wash day was the favorite day of the week for twins Lena and Wilma, now maiden ladies in their late fifties. On Monday mornings, after the breakfast dishes had been cleaned, the girls and their mother would collect dirty laundry from the last week and take it down to the wash house, separate from the house. . . . Each pile would be put into five-gallon pails, old paint pails given to them from the hardware store, then they would fill the pails with water and let the clothes soak for a few hours.

Before lunch, the girls’ mother would start boiling large kettles of water over a fire. . . . The girls’ father helped to fill the wash tub with hot water before he went back to the fields for the afternoon. Their mother would first put the church clothes in the tub and add some soap. She took a plunger and agitated the soap, working the suds deep into the clothes for a few minutes. Then she got a long wooden stick—like a shepherd’s crook—to lift the clothes out and into the rinse tub, filled with clean water.

Have you ever thought of the meaning behind Christmas laundry? Those swaddling clothes didn’t wash themselves. It was the first time in eternity that God—the Everlasting One—needed someone to clean His clothes. In Jesus, God became fully human. A baby, a boy, a young man, and an adult who needed someone to scrub at His grass stains.

Jesus, God-come-to-earth, had a mind, a will, emotions, a body, and laundry. How amazing is it that the divine Son of God would not only take on our humanity but that He’d need fellow humans to help care for His humanity too!

Dear heavenly Father, thank You for humbling Yourself and allowing human beings to do Jesus’ laundry so that He could wash our sins as white as snow.