‘The Thursday before Christmas’ will be more festive this year
By Thomas Nelson, tnelson@charlescitypress.com
The Gospel Lighthouse Church in Floyd is putting together a celebration for the Thursday before Christmas, and it’s called, yes, “The Thursday Before Christmas.”
The event will be 4:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 21, and will include local families singing Christmas songs and a group of children reading the biblical Christmas story.
“A couple different families will take a block of songs,” said Joe Low, the youth pastor at Gospel Lighthouse Church.
“Our whole goal is to get the Bible’s rendition of Christmas done more than once,” Low said. “We’ll probably have four or five different blocks of people singing and four or five different readings of the Christmas story.”
Gospel Lighthouse has a Bible study that is hosted by the Evangelical Free Church Of Charles City, or CCEFree Church, on Thursdays.
The Bible study has people from Waukon, Cresco and Elma attend.
“We did a one-day men’s event three Junes ago, and we’ve had a Bible study out of that one-day men’s function ever since then,” Low said.
Last year one of the members got in touch with the Charles City Police Department to see if they could sit on the back of a semi truck and drive through the streets and sing christmas carols.
“They approved that, and they got a real good response from people opening their blinds and walking out to see what was happening,” Low said. “He did that on Christmas Eve.”
It made one of Low’s friends realize that there are a lot of people home in Charles City during the holidays, Low said.
“It kind of birthed itself into ‘The Thursday Before Christmas,'” Low said.
The group needed a non-profit organization to be the umbrella over everything, “so we all prayed about it and talked about it” and decided the Gospel Lighthouse would be the church to head up the occasion,” he said.
The group reached out to Noel Maier’s horse and carriage company, out of Riverside, to offer rides during the event, and received permission from the Charles City Council to close a part of Kelly Street near Central Park.
The street will be closed from noon Wednesday, Dec. 20, to noon Friday, Dec. 22, and the church will have a tent set up on the street with a stage for the performers.
“Inside the tent we’ll have various different cookies,” Low said, along with coffee and hot chocolate and other snacks.
“There’s really not any denominational center,” Low said. “It’s not a Catholic event, it’s not Methodist. It’s a free family Christian event, and you don’t have to be Christian to come to it, not at all.”
If the event is successful, Low hopes to keep the title “The Thursday before Christmas” because of how calender-friendly the date is for people, he said.
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