12/10/25 - 2124: A Better Way to Do Christmas at Work

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of Collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: We are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg, and our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: Christmas time is almost magical. The general spirit around the office is more genial and everyone is looking forward to time off, the Christmas party, and time away, and time with family. Almost everyone, whether you're a business owner, organizational leader, office manager, or someone moving up the ladder at work, Christmas time is a great time to love on your neighbors at work and to put your faith into action.

Martha and I today are going to talk about some ways you can let Christmas and Jesus invade your workplace. Martha, you love Christmas, don't you?

Martha: Yes, I do. I love all things about Christmas, especially recognizing the real reason for the season.

Jim: And you grew up with your mom and dad owning a business, which was a photography studio. How did they handle Christmas time?

Martha: It was a lot of fun actually, and I think, as I look back on this, I realize that one of the reasons I don't have a problem decorating early for Christmas is that as a photographer, my dad was taking pictures for Christmas long before it was Christmastime, right?

So if you want pictures to give to your family or to send in Christmas cards at Christmas time, you need to get those pictures, the sitting scheduled and done. And that might mean that you're sitting around a Christmas tree in October for a picture that's gonna be given out at Christmas time.

Jim: That's where Christmas in July sales came from, because your dad started working on that early.

Martha: Oh, probably. At least they were designing things that early, but they handled Christmas in several ways with their industry. They had to be thinking about it way before it was actually happening.

But actually handling Christmas, they were all about loving on their employees, spending time with them, planning something special, making them know that it was a very special time of year. There were times where my mom would do Christmas teas where she would invite people to come and have a special tea and read a Christmas story that pointed to Jesus, not to just presents.

And so a lot of intentionality went into Christmas in my home. Home and business, I should say.

Jim: Yeah, which were one and the same when you moved to Minnesota, that's right. Your parents had their photography studio in their home. It was a large home, they had added an edition on that was specifically for the studio and the family, and I got to be a part of these Christmas traditions where they had dinner with their employees and invited them into their home. Talk to us about that.

Martha: It was again, just a very intentional time where my parents made sure that their employees were loved on, that they showed him that they cared for them. It would probably be the only time of the year where they would take, we would all go to dinner somewhere together and reserve a special room where we could all just be in a quiet space and be enjoyable, give a memorable gift.

My parents were always very intentional with things like that to make people feel special. And sometimes that would be dinner in the home and my mom would orchestrate an elaborate meal or have people bring things. It really, it had a lot of different phases over all of my life, but always with that intentionality and with pointing the reason that we were gathering not only to love on all the employees and make them feel special, but then to point to the real reason for Christmas and to talk about Jesus.

Jim: Now Christmas around my household was a little different. My parents didn't own a business, but my dad was a manager of many salespeople, and mom and dad would wrap up Christmas presents and bring 'em to the office and give everybody that worked for my dad a present for Christmas, and they'd have a little party and it stressed my mom out a little bit, but it's what they like to do.

And it is something, after our Christmas tree caught on fire, by the way, we did have one of those Christmas vacation kind of things in our household in Maryland before we moved to Minnesota. I think our cat - again, it was involving a cat, fire on the Christmas tree, A real Christmas tree. That's where Chevy Chase got the idea.

Martha: Maybe, from your family.

Jim: Alright. What about neighbors? As you grew up celebrating Christmas, did you guys do anything in your neighborhood celebrating Christmas?

Martha: Definitely. I would say neighbors and extended behind that would be like people that my mom was in the choir with or we did the Christmas cantata at church, but for the neighbors I can remember cookie exchanges. I can remember big pots of chili, 'cause you don't have to know exactly how many people are coming to make chili, right? You just make a really big pot.

Jim: It sounds good right now.

Martha: Now have cheese and crackers and all the goodies that go with that.

Jim: And sour cream if you really wanna do it right.

Martha: Oh yeah, absolutely. And just, live it up. But have the neighbors over. Have a hot cider, hot chocolate. Mom was really good about making people feel welcome, keeping it casual enough that people didn't feel like they couldn't come or they couldn't have their family there. It was all about being welcome because that is the first step in hospitality, to really get people to open up to you and be real.

And again, that was the bottom line in our home and in all that my mom and dad did. So with the neighbors, definitely gatherings. I can't remember if we would do it every year, but we would always have, as a family, a weekend where we would frost cookies. It was like a big deal to make all the cookies.

And then, we could have a cookie exchange with the neighbors and go from there. And the more parties in a season, the better, in my home.

Jim: Yes, because you need have a bigger variety of cookies. (laughter)

Martha: Oh, there you go.

Jim: Absolutely.

Martha: And getting to really have lots of different people involved in your lives.

Jim: Christmas is something truly that Martha thinks about all year long, but we have to have a rule in order to control the Christmas spirit in our household. But we've unleashed it. But really it was: until the eggnog is on the shelves, there's no Christmas music in the house. I think Martha snuck it earlier this year.

Martha: No, you have eggnog in the fridge.

Jim: All right. That's it. There's no worries. There are many people that we consider neighbors with technology, we get connected to people all over the world and in our neighborhood too. Even through our neighborhood apps. The people we work near are our neighbors too. The people we connect with on Zoom calls, they're our neighbors, and there's so many more.

If you're hoping to build relationships and be more intentional, our book iWork4Him might be helpful for you to connect with and to love on and become a neighbor with those around you, it's not too late to order several iWork4Him Books to get them shipping out to you right away for Christmas. Go to iwork4him.com/bookstore to get a copy.

Are we running a special for this Christmas?

Martha: If you want to get a bulk or anything like that or have several sent to you, just email me, martha@iwork4him.com, I'll put that all in the show notes and we'll figure out what we can do.

Jim: Alright. Deal. iWork4Him the book, it will change how you look at your living out your faith in your work.

Martha: I don't know if you remember Jim, but last year we offered gift wrapping and we did a video of you trying to wrap a book and it was not pretty. So...

Jim: not my gift.

Martha: I'm thinking that's important, we'll figure it out for everybody.

Jim: Oh, I got an idea. I got idea. We're doing this on the fly right now. If you send us a video singing a Christmas Carol and celebrating iWork4Him somewhere in that Christmas carol, we will send you a book for free. You just gotta cover the shipping and handling, not the handling, just the shipping. We'll do the handling for free even. (laughter)

Martha: I think Jim's looking for some entertainment, everybody.

Jim: Absolutely. All right. So Martha, we have found some amazing power in celebrating Christmas with our employees over the years. What are some of the things that we've done?

Martha: I think we've taken a lot of ideas from what we talked about with my parents - having a special meal, spending time with the employees away from work, giving them gifts, being intentional in that way were all things that we've done to really celebrate the season and get people away from the workspace so that they can enjoy the relationships that we've been building over the years.

What else do you think of?

Jim: Yeah, it's a tough - we ran an insurance agency, which you know, between Thanksgiving and New Year's, 50% less business was done during those times of year 'cause people are busy. But we enjoyed celebrating Christmas by getting people into our home, our closest employees into our home.

And that has always been a fun time because when you get people in your home, it totally breaks down barriers. I'm just going right back to the eighties. "Totally. For sure. You betcha." Oh, that was a Minnesota eighties. When you bring people into your home, it breaks down those barriers that allows them to just feel the love that you really have for them without the pressure of phone calls and without the pressure of quotas or whatever.

It's been fun. And because you love to decorate for Christmas, the house always looks so amazing. We've done office parties, we've done home parties. I don't know that we ever figured it out, what was the perfect way to do it, but we love to celebrate christmas. I know on our New Year's show, we're gonna let you guys know what we've done for New Year's. That's been a really powerful thing too.

Martha: Yeah. I think that, now our team is virtual and so we have done even like just Zoom calls and had special time to just be like, Hey, let's enjoy each other. We've done a video for Christmas for all of our listeners. And that's been really fun as a team to put together and just to celebrate. It's really about being creative. It's really about just sharing that we love them and that we see that there's more to this time of year than gift giving and bonuses and things like that.

But Jim, are those things important?

Jim: Yes. Yes. Everybody loves gifts. Okay but again, going back to something we talked about in our Thanksgiving special, you need to know the love languages of your people or according to Dr. Paul White, the five languages of appreciation. Sometimes you can't talk about love at work. I don't know why you can't, but you can talk about appreciation.

Martha: It's not that you can't, you just have to be cautious. That's all.

Jim: Yes. So you have to figure out how do people receive love and whether it's through words of affirmation or whether it's through gifts, or whether it's through quality time, or whether it's through acts of service or whether it's through touch, physical touch, which in an office would be no more appropriate than maybe a Christmas hug maybe, but maybe a pat on the back, a handshake, whatever it might be.

But so when you're giving out gifts, they should be specific to the people that you get. Everybody loves getting bonuses. Now remember though, when you give people a cash bonus. They get taxed on it. So you can give Christmas gifts that don't have additional taxation on them. Be creative.

Martha: It's very easy for something like a gift or a bonus to turn into something negative and so I just caution you...

Jim: like the jelly of the month Club.

Martha: Okay. Going to the Griswolds again, but just the idea that, if you are going to set a standard, make sure you can always reach that standard or change it up so that they're not expecting this and then when they get something else, they're disappointed. Because you're intentionally giving them something out of the generosity of your heart, but the worst thing would be is if they were disappointed because it wasn't better than last year, or it wasn't the same as last year, or it wasn't whatever.

So I just, I caution you to really think about that and think about the future so that when you're making a decision for this year, that you're not setting up something that will just disappoint people in the future. Kinda like what you were saying with the taxes, Jim, people say, oh, I wanna give 'em a hundred dollars. If you take out all the taxes on a gift, it ends up being what? $55 or something that they get.

Jim: And that's what's so important. So if you're gonna have a bonus, it should be based on activity and productivity. A lot of times people set up bonus programs for all year long, right?

So it shouldn't be a Christmas bonus. It should be a Christmas gift. There you go. And it's different. And it shouldn't be contingent on their productivity. It should be contingent on the generosity of your heart.

Martha: Yeah. Truly a gift.

Jim: Right. And so think about it, plan about it, build it into your budget, so when you get to the end of the year, you're not like, wow, we had a tough year. Plan it ahead, set aside money all year long. Now it's too late 'cause you listen to the show, you got just a couple weeks till Christmas. But when you give generously, because we have a generous heavenly father who's given us everything and everything you have came from him, and you got people that work for you.

Hopefully you already pay them a generous wage. You got people that work for you that have had unexpected things happen this year. The economy's not been phenomenal.

Martha: I was just gonna say, this might be the year to give a ham or a turkey or something like that, because it's something tangible that they may need, that they may not splurge on in the way that they could, if you helped them in that way.

Jim: Or a prime rib.

Martha: I was thinking the same thing.

Jim: If you're gonna go all out and spend a hundred bucks, buy 'em Prime rib, because that's really awesome. Are we gonna do prime rib this year at Christmas? Martha started this Christmas tradition when we lived in Fort Myers and I've loved it. She's carried it forward into Missouri.

Alright, but be creative. Involve your spouse in trying to do this - whether you're the woman running the business and get your guy's perspective, you're the guy running the business. Get your wife's perspective, but just be generous. And maybe you're not the boss in your workplace, but you could still make an impact at your workplace. You can still have a party. You can get your boss's permission to have a party. You can have a party for just the people that you work with, but getting people into your home.

A way to welcome them not only into your home, but to introduce them to Jesus who lives in your home and lives in your heart. And it gives a chance for you to be a great example to them by hosting them. We recommend no alcohol. Not because alcohol is evil, obviously too much alcohol can cause all kinds of trouble, but sometimes when you have alcohol, people dunno when to stop. So no alcohol. You could have that bubbly grape juice stuff.

Martha: You don't wanna make a situation where people are later apologizing for how they acted or anything. You wanna make it a safe environment for everybody.

Speaking of planning parties and events, we have several exciting events that we will be participating in in 2026. So I just wanna encourage you to check out our events page, iwork4him.com/events, and you can get all the details and the discount codes for registering. We really do hope to see you face to face in 2026, so let us know that you'll be there so we can plan to connect.

Jim: And when you do show up to these events, please walk up and introduce yourself to us, 'cause we've met thousands and thousands of people over the years. Sometimes we forget names and we would love to be able to remember your name.

But the whole point of today's show - Martha, Christmas time is a joyous time. It is the thing that makes you most happy, really... I hope... just slightly less than me (chuckling) , but Christmas time can also really hard for people. There's a lot of emotions tied to it. Some people didn't have great Christmases growing up, or they were a negative experience growing up. There's some other reasons. What are some of the other reasons why Christmas time might just be hard?

Martha: If people have experienced a loss of a family member this year or in recent past, or there's been a divorce or something else has happened, it can be, like you said, just sad or scary or the unknown because you're gonna miss - you can feel lonely even when you're around a lot of people. So being aware of that, that it may be a really tough time for some people. Also just because of the financial burden that we put on ourselves. Our culture is terrible about that, about pressuring people to spend money that they don't have.

But all of those things can weigh it down on people and be a burden. So I think it's important to pay attention to the people that you work with. Just like we talk about on the iWork4Him Nation Covenant all the time is being aware of how people are and what they're dealing with personally, so that you can meet them where they're at, that you can be sensitive to that and love on them in a way that's gonna minister to them.

Just a couple ways that I think that you can do that is just acknowledging that, pulling them aside and saying, Hey, is there anything this year that you would like to see or not see, or how can I help you? Because if you know what they've experienced during the year, you can directly address that and say, Hey, I know your best friend passed away this year, and I can imagine that this is gonna be a different season for you. Is there anything I can do to help you through that?

Or just being real with people and acknowledging that you pay attention to their life and that you care about those details. I think that is such a huge thing. But especially this time of year as they may feel like they can't bring it up. They don't wanna be a Debbie Downer. They don't wanna dampen everybody else's mood. So those are just some things I can think of. Can you think of anything else, Jim? How we can minister to people?

Jim: David Downer. Not just Debbie Downer. But David.

I think it's also important to be sensitive. There are some people that don't celebrate Christmas. If you've got people that practice the Jewish faith that you work with, they celebrate Hanukkah and it's before Christmas. And so it is a festival of lights. So to be familiar with what they are and just to say, Hey, we're having a Christmas party. Does that offend you or not? Tell us how you feel about it. We'd still love to have you participate.

But just ask questions. And you may have some people of other faiths that you work with. Almost everybody celebrates the spirit of Christmas, 'cause people love getting gifts and people love lights and Christmas trees. It's just a, it's a fun time. We've run into one person in our life who is offended by Christmas lights. That's not most people. Most people love Christmas time because it's encouraging.

But some people don't get to go home for the holidays. And so my encouragement is if you know somebody's gonna be alone because they're not from your area, invite 'em to your family celebration. It's okay. It'll be different, but it'll still be fun. And it'll add some new conversations. You won't have to hear grandpa tell the same story the 77th time. You'll have other stories to tell.

Martha: Grandpa has new audience. (laughing)

Jim: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Sit 'em next to grandpa so they can tell the stories. But minister to people in a healthy way and just ask them.

If you notice people are struggling just say, "Hey, what's going on?" And "thank you for sharing that" and pray with 'em if they're struggling.

Martha: And also to celebrate the positive things too. Somebody might've had a baby this year or might've gotten married and acknowledging that, hey, this is a new time for you, baby's first Christmas. You have new memories to be making, and so we can help with that.

Jim: Our first Christmas together, remember? I remember we had a Christmas tree in our apartment in Mankato, Minnesota, on top of the gold carpet. And we put another rug up. I don't remember much about that. I remember the next year at christmas in our first home, where we went and bought a Christmas tree at a local Christmas tree lot, and we had a little Ford escort wagon, going way back to the mid eighties and we bought this Christmas tree. It was just beautiful. And we had a vaulted ceiling, so we wanted the tall Christmas tree.

What we hadn't paid attention to was the width of the Christmas tree, and we brought this Christmas tree, threw on the top of the roof of the car, and we had a hard time getting up to speed on the way home, and so we didn't know what the real deal was, but we had some trouble.

Martha: Yeah, we did. We knew we got a big tree.

Jim: We got a big tree. We're like, maybe it's bigger than we thought. And then we got home. And we unleashed it in our living room. And it was again, just like Christmas vacation. And it went (makes explosion noise) and the piano had to move and the couch had to move and the chairs had to move and it filled up the whole living room.

Martha: But it made a good memory, didn't it, Jim? (chuckling)

Jim: And when we pulled it out of the house, it left five feet of Christmas tree needles everywhere. A pile high. It was unbelievable.

Martha: You're good at exaggeration. (laughter)

Jim: It was great Christmas. It was a great Christmas. Alright, but for all of you listening, look around to the people around you to minister them. Help them have good memories. Light up your house to encourage other people. Don't have a competition. If other people, if there's an old person in your neighborhood, somebody chronologically superior and they want lights up, then maybe they're not so great on a ladder anymore, offer to help 'em put lights up.

In your neighborhood, in your workplace, there's people around you that need Jesus. Christmas is the introduction of Jesus to the world. You can't make it any more important, so take some time. Be intentional. You got a couple of weeks from when this show releases to be intentional on how you live out your faith at work during Christmas time to encourage people, to love on people.

Martha: Yeah. So if you're looking for a simple way to do those things for others, remember, you can Google, you can get ideas for keeping it simple, but making it really special. And if you're looking for a simple way to support iWork4Him in 2026, you can just round up. We have a program through Project World Impact that allows all your purchases to be rounded up on your credit card and then donated to our ministry. I'm gonna put the link in the show notes for you to find that and you can get signed up and start off for the new year.

Jim: So I work for him.com/donate. You've been listening to iWork4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers. Our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him. Merry Christmas!