After a tumultuous year in Washington, D.C., Congress has adjourned and I am relishing the chance to be home in Indiana among family and friends. Taking our kids shopping and seeing the "world's largest Christmas tree" at Monument Circle will begin a Christmas weekend that will soon be submerged in the ether of family and tender memories.

Christmas to me has always been a time punctuated by a sense of the permanent things in my life....my wife and children, my mother and siblings, my in-laws, nieces and nephews and friends. And Christmas is a time when my present pays tribute to my past. I will sit up late on Christmas Eve and think of my father, gone now 20 years. I will hear the clamor of Christmas of my youth, my Irish grandfather's brogue and I will look again into my grandmother's gentle eyes.

And Christmas has always been a time when I am uniquely capable of being grateful. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve the people of Indiana in Congress and for the prayers of so many constituents who sustain our service by their faith. I am grateful to the soldiers and their families who will spend this season apart so my family can gather and worship in freedom.

I am grateful to all those whose acts of generosity will make this Christmas joyful for the needy families in our communities. I am grateful for the pastors and church workers who will labor through the holidays to add meaning to our lives. And I am grateful for the countless acts of kindness by Hoosiers who will find a lonely neighbor this Christmas and extend Christ's love in Christmas cheer.

And I am grateful to God, who "so loved the world that he sent his one and only son, that whoever might believe in him should have eternal life."

"Unto us a child is born."

Merry Christmas.

--Mike Pence