With them, I looked and saw a blurred jumbled mess of nothing.

Without them, I looked and saw tiny, run-of-the-mill Christmas lights on rows of artificial display trees waiting for someone to buy and end the long, and very tiring for employees, Black Friday event at a local hardware store.

Cynical about this business selling one more useless piece of consumerism for children, I figured they would mean nothing to my four year old grandson who wanted to try them. But as I watched him stretch the glasses tightly across his eyes and the sides of his head, he came alive with wonder and joy!

His eyelashes smushed against the little plastic lenses, head turning side to side, he squealed with delight. Grinning and exuding joy in ever fiber of his being, he exclaimed, Reindeer, Bebe, there are reindeer everywhere!!

He saw so much more than a blurred jumbled mess because he was willing to look through the filter of 3D glasses as they were intended. Holding them tightly against his eyes instead of a few inches from his face as I had, those little cardboard/plastic glasses had turned the ordinary into an extraordinary show of reindeer faces and antlers which looked back at him from every light on every tree in the store!

And on our way out to the car, they changed every street light, car light and even the clear night sky’s moon into reindeer faces!

Surprise, amazement, and simple joys abounded because of a simple $1.99 pair of Christmas 3D glasses.

Something I completely missed. Stuck in routine, cynical, not expecting anything, tired from a day’s travel, and not really a fan of 3D movies, I totally missed the beautiful simple treasure he and his sister had found.

Yet alive with wonder, risking so very little to try the glasses as they were intended, my grandson was richly rewarded with an ability to see beyond the familiar to the joys opened up to him that evening in late November!

Simple lenses that could change the ordinary stuff of life . . . after a cursory glance, not seeing anything but a blur, I had flippantly tossed them aside and missed the surprise.

My grandson, wide-eyed with wonder willing to take in everything life has to offer, had fully embraced the glasses. And oh what a show he enjoyed for days to come!

Oh God, give me your eyes, your filters to see the world around me as you see it, intended it to be and ask us to pool all our energies into making it be again.

Oh God, help me see your purpose within each person, child and created thing I come in contact with each day.

May I learn to be more childlike in my faith, expectation, wonder and joy . . . come, o come Emmanuel!