Tag Archives: Christmas

Thoughts from This Christmastime

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I know that it is time to write here because it has been more than a month since I wrote here last. That is reason enough in itself. If we pile on the significant facts that it is almost Christmas, and that I am, for the time being, off of work, the argument that I should sit down and write a blog entry becomes very, very convincing.

So at about noon, I opened a document and fussed around with all the phrases that have been running around my brain for the last few weeks, but none of them seemed to have much to say for themselves. They were tired, like I am. And then I started googling “Christmas writing prompts,” hoping the internet would save me. After a few abysmal minutes of that, I gave up and have spent about a quarter of an hour staring at the screen, wondering why the often-confident voice in my head is so quiet.

Perhaps it’s because I’m meant to listen for now.

I am meant to listen to the clock ticking.

I am meant to listen to the front door of my building squeak as my neighbor goes in and out.

I am meant to listen to the poetry read aloud.

I am meant to listen to the hiss and bubble of the chili in my crockpot when I stir it.

I am meant to listen when George Bailey shouts in exultation, “My mouth’s bleeding, Bert! My mouth’s bleeding!”

I am meant to listen to the sound of my sock feet padding on the wood floor.

And I am meant to listen to the heavenly refrain that’s been repeating my head, soft and sleepy, like waves on the shore, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests!”

 

Christmas (Promised)

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I’ve always been one of those purists who doesn’t want to see any Christmas decorations or hear any Christmas songs or eat anything that tastes like peppermint or cinnamon until after Thanksgiving, because there’s a schoolmarm living on my shoulder who says that we must keep the season unto itself so that it will remain precious and unspoilt.

But this year I’m throwing that out the window. Maybe it’s because my mom has been texting me potential dates for the Christmas party they’re throwing this year, or maybe it’s because the books sitting next to me on the couch right now are Thomas Cahill’s The Gift of the Jews, Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk, and Malcolm Guite’s Waiting on the Word, all of which sound like promises. But more likely the reason that my roommate and I took a detour the other night in Harris Teeter to prowl around for chocolate advent calendars is that in the last few months, and even especially in the last few weeks, I have been learning how little control I have over my own life and any goodness that comes from it, and how every neat little security structure I have set up will eventually fail me, sometimes in a spectacular fashion. But when I think of Christmas coming in forty-three days, I feel peaceful in a way that cannot possibly make sense to the outside world.

The advent of Christmas means the advent of a Savior, a Savior who will fulfill everything the prophecies foretold and see this thing through to the bitter, wine-on-a-pike end, all the way through to the blinding new life on the other side. So I’ve had a change of heart, like Scrooge, because it is more and more wonderfully apparently that Jesus is not only a rock, but the only solid one, and I want to try to “keep Christmas all the year” to remind myself.

Something else I’m doing this fall, besides learning hard lessons that I thought I already knew, is interviewing women about their faith. The first question I have been asking right off the bat is “Tell me your favorite Bible story.” So that’s how I’m going to keep Christmas today. I’m going to tell you the story.

It begins with a scared girl who is trusting, trusting and a good man with her who is trusting, trusting. The two of them are headed on a trip away from home to obey the law of the land, and then in a strange barn on the old hay with the smell of manure there is pain and terror and blood and then a crying baby, alongside the sleepy animals.

And an angel comes, but not to Joseph and Mary, to some tired shepherds on a nearby hillside. The angel announces joy to the shepherds, that the newborn in the feeding trough has come to save them, that this is God’s plan and they are the first the hear news of this One who bears peace and goodwill into the world. The angel brings a whole singing host with him. So the shepherds hurry to worship, and then they hurry to tell the story as far and wide as they can.

And there is a star too, a big, bright one, but not for Joseph and Mary. Instead the star is for men in the East who follow it to travel far and risk their lives to give the tiny King the worship that they somehow know they owe him.

And the scared girl who trusted gathers and treasures all these things in her heart. And so do we, because this is the promise of things to come.

Oh, joyful and triumphant, come let us adore him, Christ the Lord!

Christmas and Tradition

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When I was growing up, Christmas meant Grandma’s. It meant long hours in the car stuffed with puffy coats, reading Dickens’ Christmas Carol aloud stave by stave, and then arriving in Missouri to cousins and orange balls and running fast on carpet in sock feet. Christmas meant crowded rooms and couches and beds. It meant all twenty-some of us choosing a favorite carol in order from oldest to youngest while siblings switched off at the piano. It meant sitting hip-to-hip with contented joy. I was in awe of those Christmases, so in awe that they sometimes made me forget myself.

But I am grown now, and no Christmas will ever be the same. My grandparents have been gone for over a year and the house is sold. The place we went is no longer ours and the faces which used to await our arrival have been buried. The things which made me love Christmas so seem to have vanished. So it is tempting to me to spend the holiday mourning the traditions and the stability that are lost. This time of year, I want nothing more than to run back to the comforts of childhood or even adolescence, to revel in the reliable beauty of those Christmas customs.

But I cannot return to those traditions, so instead I will try to remember the self-forgetfulness that they taught me.  Because Christmas is not actually meant to be about tradition. It is meant to be about the world turned upside down, shook to its core. It is the story of a remote corner of a poor place where a child was born to speak truth, and to sweat blood, and to die, that I may know truth, and be clean, and live.

Every year that is true. The foundations of our little worlds may shudder, the walls which kept us safe and warm may crumble, the faces around us may seem strange and hard, but every year, if we look up, a star calls us to Bethlehem. We are meant to follow its light, to worship and be changed.

On Friday, I read How the Grinch Stole Christmas to my juniors for storytime. I laughed through some of it, but some lines moved me:

Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small,
Was singing! Without any presents at all!
He HADN’T stopped Christmas from coming! IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!

I am grateful for the Child who has come to save, and I am thirsty for his grace.

Christmas and the Light

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This year, for Christmas, George and I flew to London to see Mary. We walked a lot and rode the Tube a lot and ate some really good Pakistani food and watched a whole lot of British television. It was so good to see my sister.

Our flight home felt much quicker than the flight going, probably because it was in the middle of the day. I spent the last couple hours occasionally switching through the maps that track your progress across the ocean.  I found the one which shows you various time zones–where the sun is up and where it’s down–and I stared for about a minute. Behind us, in the UK, the sun had set several hours before, but we were still in the sunlit part of the world, and daylight stretched ahead of us. We were chasing light. Out-running the darkness, borne up by the air.

I felt a little giddy and I thought of Isaiah 9. It’s a typical Christmas passage, but I’ve been thinking of more than usual this year. It was one of the readings at the Christmas Eve service at St. Paul’s, and the queen referred to it in her Christmas day speech. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined. We were in the midst of it.

The light we chase, the light that bursts into the land of the shadow of death is the incarnate Christ, God with us. Our Lord’s highest calling was to become the lowest. The light of the incarnation and what Jesus made of the life he lived here on shabby earth can illuminate each thing we do and see and say, like a shaft of sun shooting through a crack in a heavy curtain. The indelible purpose of God made man for love and suffering, will show us, as far as we can bear to see it, the why and wherefore of the scattered pieces of our own lives. We were made to bear witness of and to the Light.

Bear witness while we sleep and when we wake. Bear witness barefoot and cold and laughing. Bear witness when He drives the demons out into the swine and bear witness while we wait on Him. Bear witness in the shadows and the promises. Bear witness to God with us and with us and with us. It’s bearing witness in this mortal coil that teaches and leads us somewhere. Leads us to glory.

On the way to my Grandpa’s funeral and back, in the car, we read The Last Battle. We got to the last chapter three days after we had buried him, as we headed up to DC, where George and I would fly to London. It ends:

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.  

After my mom finished reading, she closed the book and was very quiet.

 

The Christmas in Minnesota

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I have a week before I go back to teaching and there is so, so much to do (most of it having nothing to do with school.) But before I do all of the so, so much I need to keep up a tradition. Every year on this blog I have written about Christmas, with the exception of last year, when I must have been too busy with my novel to do anything here except whine about how tired I was. Oops. But anyway, this year there is no frantic writing independent study, only a surprisingly well-rested Alice, too distracted to take on her real to-do list.

This Christmas was quietly different from all the others (related here, here, and here.) It was both more joyful and more painful. As I get older such feelings are more keen, but more often than I used to, I know what they mean and I know what to do with them. I do not, however, always know how to express them.

I thought that I would tell you about the week in the old way, beginning to end, like a story, but it does not have enough narrative thread for that. It has a setting, of course: a Bible camp up in the Iron Range of Minnesota, where the camp director has raised his seven children, and has recently moved his quickly aging parents. Because it is Christmastime children, grandchildren, husbands, wives, and two little boys named after the same great-grandfather have converged upon the camp, where the ground is slushy, but still a bit slick. With them, they bring chocolate and the old family Christmas songbooks. They plan to stay for four or five days.

So that is the stage set, but beyond that, there is no plot, one event does not lead to another, so if I told it like that, it would make no sense. That is was not what it was. The week was not a story in itself, but merely an infinitesimal part of a great and large story, a moment about the length of a heartbeat.

My grandparents are near the end of that story. My grandma is confused and sad and only partly herself. She tries to introduce her grandchildren to one another, but remembers the taste of the orange balls she used to make. My frail grandpa is contemplative and eager for coherent company. While the girls organized a game of cousin knockout on Christmas Eve he stood bent over in the corner of the gym and enthusiastically dribbled a basketball till it bounced out of reach. He stands up in Sunday meeting and says that we are greatly blessed by Christ’s coming. And he asks, again and again, that we all sing “Come Let Us Adore Him.” (That’s his preferred title for the carol, I think, because he does not consider himself particularly “faithful,” but he does know Jesus to be worthy of adoration.)

My mother and her siblings are at another part of the story. A part which is harder and less certain than they anticipated, I think. They take charge and they clean and they cook and they delegate and they worry. They find perhaps that, more than before, they have no one older and wiser to pass their worries along to, save passing them around in a circle to one another. They must go straight back to the Source with it all, give every bit of it up in prayer. Then when next their hands are free on Christmas Eve some one of us bestows upon them a child to hold: a quiet, solemn little gift-baby, theirs for a few minutes, who will nestle his head into their shoulder and rest.

Then there are the grandchildren. (That’s us.) We are at the part of the story in which we have come into our own, some of us without noticing. I can only speak for myself, but the old excitement for Christmas has been replaced by a certain sober joy. My cousins sat on the couch and helped grade the fill-in-the-blanks on the last test I gave, and I remembered sprawling on the end-room bed with them, summers before, reading To Kill a Mockingbird. On the 23rd we dragged down the tree from the attic, set it up with great care, and literally festooned the rafters with lights. On Christmas Eve night, we had a dance party (inspired by Sally’s cautious hip-hop moves.) When we are together now, we want to be together. We don’t care if we dance like Peanuts characters. We are not forgetting ourselves, but deliberately setting ourselves aside. We are slowly, at our own paces and in our own ways, learning the value of what has been given to us: the old summers in the above-ground pool, Proverbs read at breakfast-time, full couches and long legs, parents who name their daughters Hope.

Earliest in the story are Billy and Liam. Small lap-sitters, futures unseen, no worries beyond whether they too are allowed to have some of that candy they see everyone else has got. It is for them that Christmas is intended first and foremost. Jesus’s beginning as infant was his loud, clear announcement of his intentions: that since he was coming as the least of these, he meant to love and save the least of these.

And so, if we follow the story, beginning to end (or end to beginning, as it were,) we find the Son of God at its core: the adored gift-child, bearing in his tiny frame all the fearful hope and promise of his death for our redemption.

Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free; from our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee. Israel’s strength and consolation, hope of all the earth thou art; dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart.

Christmas and Awe of a Small Kind

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Last night, I was having trouble sleeping because my head was so stuffy and my room was chilly, so I wrapped myself in a warm blanket and curled up on the chair in the upstairs hallway. All the lights were out and I watched the gas heater flickering in front of me. Inside the blacked windows on the front of the heater, there is a cracked and crusted latticework, and behind that burns a tall, orange flame. Last night I turned it up so I could hear the gas softly roaring and ticking, and all around the foot of the lone tongue of fire, dozens of tiny blue flames sprung up. I stared at the impressive shadows the fire cast through the latticework into the darkness, and pitifully wished that I could still breathe through my nose.

When I was a little girl, I used to turn up those flames just to watch them burn. I would crouch on the floor, pressed against the little factory-printed placard which read, “Keep children, clothing, and furniture away,” and I would imagine that the inside of that heater was a small cathedral. The shapes of the lattice pointed heavenward like church windows, and the tall flame was a preacher, praising his God. All the little blue fires were his congregation, or sometimes even the choir, if I turned it up very high so that I could hear them singing hallelujah in a quick, clicking rhythm as gas was released. I thought it was the most beautiful little world in there. Sometimes, even at the wise old age of seven or eight, I had to restrain myself from prying the hot glass off the front to see if I could get inside, enter the cathedral, burn like a singing flame beneath the majesty of those arches.

Last night as I sat in the darkness and watched the tall flame rise and rise and rise I remembered all that. I wondered why I didn’t feel awe like that anymore, especially at Christmastime, the time of the lighted fir tree and the swelling choral arrangement. A couple months ago I told my students very certainly that if they ever found themselves in a place in life in which there were not awed, then they were in the wrong place. I burrowed deeper into my blanket and doubted my own words.

I do believe that awe is the response for which the Advent season begs. This is why we set children in the midst of it, hand them presents, watch their faces glow, and sentimentally compare them to the baby in the manger. Awe comes naturally when you are small and everything looks big, and it is for this reason that Christ bids us to “come as little children.”

But there are other sorts of Christmases, lest we forget. New life always arrives with the silent promise of eventual death. Two years ago I wrote this entry about the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, and last night I could not stop thinking about T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Journey of the Magi.” “A cold coming we had of it,” the kingly speaker says “…A hard time we had of it…Sleeping in snatches, / With the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.” The wise men reach the appointed place (there is no mention of a bright, guiding star, no room for awe,) and the wine is all drunk up, three trees grow close together in a meadow, and a white horse mysteriously gallops away as they approach. The speaker pronounces the wonder they have come to see to be “satisfactory.” Then, hesitantly, he continues,

I had seen birth and death,  

But had thought they were different; this Birth was 

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, 

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

I actually got up out of my warm chair last night and turned on the light so I could re-read that poem. And even now, a day later, I am still struggling to explain the solace it offered me. It seemed to say that the way birth pains mirror death pains is not coincidental, that sleeping only in snatches is better than not waking at all, that at times it is well to be unsatisfied with the “old dispensation.”

So, if the remembrance of Christ’s birth does not provide me with the feeling of awe which I’ve been demanding, at least it brings me a measure of certainty. Certainty that God made his promises with the purpose of fulfilling them, that that there is order in his plan, that Someone much greater than myself is at work far beyond my sight. (Someone greater than myself? Beyond my sight? Perhaps this is awe after all. Awe of a small kind.)

After I read the poem I turned off the light again and returned to my chair by the flickering heater. I pulled the blanket tight, tight around me and I prayed. I prayed for those magi, and their hard, cold journey towards the Savior. (Sometimes I figure that if eternity is eternity and God really is outside of time, I can pray for anyone anywhere in history, and my Lord will hear.) I prayed that my own heart would soften and rest. I prayed for my students to whom, I think, awe still comes naturally. I prayed and I watched the tall flame glimmer in the cathedral, and listened to the tick of the gas valve in the dark, warm room.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined.” Isaiah 9:2

Why This Matters

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Yesterday I had my last CivArts and Dr. Munson talked about modernism and postmodernism, all crushed into one little class period. I love modernism, and I am not entirely sure why. I think it is because of the earnestness of self-critique and the push for excellence and the wholehearted love of a worthwhile thing. Nowadays we are rarely interested and earnest and willing, or, if we are, we try not to admit to it too much. No one would want to be our friend.

Of course what happens to modernism is that it is determined to find art only in introspective progress and is sometimes rather obsessed with obscurity. It digs and digs in the darkest recesses looking for new beauties, usually while hiding its eyes from revealed truth. It crouches and shrivels away from the light, until it collapses into a little dung-heap of postmodernism and self-referential irony.

To watch this happen over the course of an hour and half has made me so sad. It’s the terrible history of a people governed by fear.

I know fear. I am afraid. Throughout college I have become a much slower writer because of fear. I am afraid that I will say the wrong thing, that I will not say it well enough, and most of all, I am afraid that the things I write have no real meaning, that my words are just cheap, hollow ornaments which will shatter when dropped, to then be swept up, thrown away, and forgotten.

So, in my small grey puddle of fear, I sympathize with the modernists in their avant-garde tunnel vision. If it’s new, there’s a better chance of something worthwhile being accidentally dredged up in there somewhere, right? At my worst, I must even acknowledge a kinship with the deconstructionists. Some mornings, before I get up, I lie there, deeply afraid that there is nothing worth saying at all.

But I keep writing. I wrote papers this semester, kept up with my blog, edited two magazines, and drafted a novel. Why do I do that? Why do I spend hours of my life crouched on my desk chair, staring at a blinking cursor, hugging my knees, accidentally holding my breath while waiting for a word?

I do it because fear is mortal. I do it because fear pronounces my efforts dead and futile, but John Donne told me that death shall die. I do it because there are bloody hands stretched upon a cross, mighty and willing to save Prufrock from drowning. I do it because death has burst out of the grave and invited me to put my hand in his open side. I do it because a very long time ago, men followed a star in the eastern sky, where the sun rises, and found God incarnate. I do it because the Child who lies in the manger in Bethlehem is eternally stronger than the marked monstrosity which slouches towards it.

“For unto us a Child is born, / Unto us a Son is given.”

Howell Christmas

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Jackie has taken to announcing recently that she is “feeling little today.” We know what she means when she says it. It’s one of those days when you’re not up to adult conversation or behavior or responsibility or probably even adult thought. What you’re up for is sitting in bed eating advent calendar chocolate and watching Charlie Brown bemoan commercialism.

I have felt little this Christmas. In fact, I often feel little at Christmas. When I am at Grandma’s in the summertime I feel mature and responsible. Two summers ago, when I was the only grandchild there, I was physically the strongest person in the house. (Every time I tell people that they apologize for laughing. It’s okay. Laugh. I, too, have seen my arms.) But Christmas at Grandma’s leaves me feeling little. Little and awed and surrounded by good things.

Last Christmas I wrote an entry called “Things Change,” and I am here, a year later, to tell you that they do, and that’s all right, but sometimes they don’t, and isn’t it grand? Almost everybody made it this Christmas, including Emily and André and their babies (she had twins this summer,) and my cousin’s fiancée Ashley, and all four generations of Billys, ages three to eighty-seven. There is nothing to make one feel warm with claustrophobia and familial affection quite like over thirty people crowded into one medium-small house where most of them feel quite at home and know where the silverware drawer is. Meals were something epic.

We’re growing up. The babies were sleepy little dolls and everybody held them at some point. Watching my cousins pass them around reminded me that our own babies are probably only a few Christmases away for some of us, and other parts of growing up are frighteningly close. Peter’s applying to law schools, Hannah will be an RN in April, Joe’s studying for his EMT exam, Tina’s moving to Peru next month and Billy’s getting married in two weeks.

But I think the secret of growing up is that it’s not such a great big deal as we all pretend. All of those people are still in many ways just the same as I remember them at ten-years-old. We can’t fit five of us on the loveseat in the living room anymore, but we still try. We can drive ourselves to Sonic now and pay for our food with money we earned, but we still sing Christmas carols with obnoxious gusto and slip on the ice while hectically switching cars. We are not really old yet—Hope is still shorter than me for one more year and Molly has a year and half of high school left.

This year we had a few newcomers who were experiencing their first Howell Christmas. Along with the babies, and Billy’s fiancée Ashley, whom we cousin-approved with great excitement and a piece of pink construction paper (no forged signatures this time!), Emily and André brought their friend, John. I wonder what they must think as we drag them into the great communal singing of the Twelve Days of Christmas and watch Sally, my mom’s littlest sister, conduct the last verse of each song. They are good sports. One evening we sat in the living room and threw Little Billy’s stuffed blocks at each other just because we could, but we don’t all have the best of aim, you know. It was a bit of a war zone.

Anyway, after all that, nineteen left on Christmas Eve, leaving behind a detritus of Christmas cookies and forgotten socks and underwear, and everything felt small and quiet with just the McLellans and Uncle Jon and us. We played Monopoly for the first time in years, with the anticipated miserable results and watched It’s a Wonderful Life and Charlie Brown Christmas, along with Sally’s new Christmas movie. It was peaceful and friendly, with one big table and one kids’ table (though UJ had to keep raising the maximum age for the latter until four of us were young enough to sit there.) We ate at Kaitlynn’s Deli and I slept on the TV room couch which is my favorite.

Each year the things that are worth being thankful for, the things responsible for my littleness and awe, are not the things that are old or the things that are new, but the things that are good. Cookies in the breezeway, unorganized games of Fishbowl, the way Sally refers to my mom as “my sister Hope,” my little brother who is too shy to hold a baby for more than a few seconds, snow-covered fields, my grandpa who uses a PA system just to talk to his own family in his own living room, (but still says more worth hearing than I ever do,) interstate highways, joy to the world, and a January wedding, where we’ll get to see each other all over again, so that this time, goodbye did not mean very much at all.

Christmas for Today

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I was small when Columbine happened. I do remember hearing about the shootings at Virginia Tech in high school, though. I remember seeing the grief but not really partaking in it. The first of these tragedies to really hit me in the gut was what happened in Aurora this summer. I think you grow into sadness and grief with age, but so many children today did not get that luxury. They were forced to endure a terror and chaos which they could not pretend to understand.

This is hard. It’s been taking hours to sink in. I cried just now and called my dad. Then I sat on our little couch with my physics book closed on my lap and thought. I remembered that President Roosevelt once called December 7th “a date which will live in infamy.” I thought that really every date ought live in infamy.  Each day of the year is a remembrance to someone of great travesty and pain inflicted by another human being. I thought each date ought to weigh so heavy that it should be hard to get up in the morning.

I looked out the window and saw the star on top of Rockwell, the coming star, the calling star. I remembered a different Child and a different death. I thought that Christmastide is not always a celebration. It does need to be forever merry. The advent season is a coming and a promise of coming again. Today it is you and me and all of our brothers and sisters on our knees, begging for all these things to be brought to fruition, for God to send His Son again to heal the broken hearts and the broken world, begging to be reminded that God is not dead nor doth He sleep. I thought that today of all days, in the midst of infamy and weeping sons and daughters, we must not forget the Child in the manger.

Friends

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Last night I watched It’s a Wonderful Life in Harker Lounge with quite a few people whom I like very much. At the end George gets a copy of Tom Sawyer from Clarence with this inscription in it: “Dear George, Remember, no man is a failure who has friends. Thanks for the wings. Love, Clarence.” Well, I’ve been feeling real rich and successful lately.

I am so grateful for the people who surround me, who listen to me and who I get to listen to. I am grateful for friends who let me mark up what they write. I am grateful for friends who laugh at me, whether I am funny or not. I am grateful for friends who let me share their worries, and who don’t mind that sometimes I have nothing to mend their hurts but my own creased brow. I am grateful for friends who send short emails and leave long voicemails. I am grateful for friends who are generous and enthusiastic on days when I am neither. I am grateful for friends who sass me, who point and giggle when I am silly. I am grateful for friends who love my family and my past simply because they are mine. I am grateful for friends who remember what I told them long ago. I am grateful for friends who hold my hands while they talk to me. I am grateful for friends with whom to be silent.

I am grateful for these people who have, for whatever reason, found me worth their time. They remind me every day that my God is good. He is good to me.