BRANDON, S.D. (KELO) — Catholic priest Chuck Cimpl of Sioux Falls is celebrating mass in Brandon this Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. For him personally, one of his favorite parts of this season is how special it can be for kids.
“When they celebrate birthdays, it’s a big thing, and they like to celebrate other people’s birthdays, too,” Cimpl said. “Not just their own, and so when they think of the birthday of Christ, it’s a very important time in their lives to celebrate that.”
The season might be harder for someone if they’re personally struggling. Cimpl offers up three words to bear in mind.
“I always think of when people are going through good times and bad times, kind of the three Cs,” Cimpl said. “You choose. You can choose what you want to do, and sometimes in our mourning and when things go kind of bad in our lives we choose to be alone, and that’s fine for a while. But the next one is very important: to connect.”
Here, this Catholic pastor references another faith tradition.
“I think even in Hanukkah that connection that they had in the Jewish temple when they rededicated it, it was important to gather together in the temple, and they started to light the candle, and they thought it was only going to last for one day, and it lasted for eight,” Cimpl said. “Kind of the miracle of Hanukkah that people needed to connect to.”
And that third C for Cimpl at Christmas?
“Not only choose, connect, but also communicate,” Cimpl said. “There’s something about communicating our feelings that becomes important in good times and in bad times, and that’s important, too, when people gather in a religious setting, a church, a synagogue, a temple, wherever they’re gathering, to communicate to each other that hey, this is something unique about just gathering with people and experiencing that joy and sometimes even the sorrow that they’re going through in their life so they can do it all together.”
