boxing up Christmas

Two days ago was New Year's Day; I boxed up Christmas.

We brought down the egg box, left over from moving, six years ago.  Both manger scenes were put away, figure by figure laid back into styrofoam and blown-plastic pockets.  Snow globes nestled into boxes, cushioned with pine garland.  Ornaments were unhung, and packed away between pages of paper toweling.  Christmas books, a collection added to each year, arranged by size and snugged into a corner of the Christmas box.  An ornate glass bottle and brass box - wisemen's gifts - went in the bottom, and the miniature Christmas tree - our first, so many years ago, so far from home - reclined on top.  The stable scene from my childhood, practically unmarred across the decades, fit in across the snow globes.

Sugar dismantled the brass Swedish angel chimes, piece by piece into vinyl sleeves; it was tucked in, too.  The plastic Fontanini, the magnet manger, the foam sticker nativity from someone's Sunday school - all packed away in the Christmas box.

It was heavy when I carried it upstairs, all that Christmas in an egg box, lowered with a careful thud onto the spare room closet floor.

I left out the Christmas cards, though; taped around our livingroom doorframe, we'll have company all winter.  The kitchen beam kept its pine adornment, too, with the big red bow and the red folded-paper garland from some far-away land.

I couldn't pack away the Moravian star made of gold screen, either, so it swings in the window above the kitchen sink, still catching the light.  The pine garland swags and strings of wooden cranberries will stay up on the livingroom windows, for awhile anyway.  January needs color.  In the window by the corn stove, the snowman and wool penguin still huddle together.

And the candles - jar candles and flameless candles and pillar candles and window tapers and tea-lights - they've sort of spread out and taken over.  I think we'll need their light.  January can be dark.

I boxed up Christmas, two days ago, but the remnants remind us that it was, and will come again.

my alter ego

This morning after breakfast I shared a few pieces of Toblerone (dark, from the local Amish dent & bent grocery) with my Farmer over coffee and I remembered my very first Toblerone....

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I was 22 years old, flying to Japan after college for my first Real Job*.  When the Korean Air flight attendants brought around the duty-free catalogs, it seemed like the thing to do, given my new identity as a globe-trotting sophisticate, to order something.  Ah-ha!  Here was something chocolate, something affordable (my Real Job had not yet netted me my first paycheck), something imported and exotic.  [It rather betrays my true identity as a rube, doesn't it, that I'd never even heard of Toblerone before this!] 

So I bought some.  I ate it in-flight, feeling so grown-up, so urbane, so in-the-know.  A fitting start to my new jet-setting career.

*[my Real Job turned out to be, in retrospect, a hilarious misnomer.  I spent two years in the backwaters of Japan, "teaching" high school English through the Japanese government's JET Programme.  I did spend time in the classrooms, and even, on occasion, got to do some lesson-planning, but most of my time was spent catching up on any reading I hadn't gotten done in college, doing crossword puzzles, creating bitmap art on Windows Paint, and customizing the appearance of my new laptop, with a little worksheet-creation, hangman-playing and pronunciation-modeling thrown in for good measure.]

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Fast-forward sixteen years ... I am sitting at a worn kitchen table in my century-old farmhouse, overseeing the education of my children in rural Pennsylvania, dressed in a hand-me-down sweater and jeans that pre-date some of my children.  Some sophisticate I turned out to be.

The contrast amused me this morning, as I drank my generic decaf coffee brewed the pre-Keurig way in a plain old drip coffeemaker.  But as I wrote this post, I used thesaurus.com to help me find "urbane", and saw that sophisticate as a verb means to adulterate, to cheapen, contaminate, corrupt, degrade, falsify, taint, make impure, water down ... and I realized that sophistication has never really been the goal of my heart at all.

There is nothing I want more, truly, than to be unalloyed, pure, undiluted - aimed hard & undistracted at my Maker.  And there is nothing harder, for me, than just being who He made me to be, and not who I think you'll want me to be.

During the past four months, I have gradually emerged - been freed, really - from the depression that has cocooned me for over a year.  Part of this has been through teachings on God's design for us, and part of it was, I believe, the depression itself:  born of weariness in mask-wearing, it gave me respite, a space in which to rest, and heal.

The depression itself, it seems, was a means to freedom.  Which reminds me, again, of the chrysalis.

A jar waits on a shelf.  One chrysalis hangs empty, a story of freedom attained.  Two remain, and what they contain, whether dormant butterfly or wasp, or nothing, only God knows.

I wait, too.  Only God knows His design for me, and whether sophisticate or rube, or something yet unimagined, He will bring it about in His good time.  This I know.

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grinch-y thoughts

It is New Year's Eve .... and I am remembering Christmas Eve:  snow falling outside; the presents wrapped, the halls decked, the children reviewing their lines for a program at church that night.

And I -

- I was thinking grinch-y thoughts.

This is exciting:  snow! and Christmas Eve programs! presents! and family reunions! feasting! cookies to & from neighbors! bows! ribbons! secrets & surprises!

The trouble is, I don't want exciting.  I mean, I like it, at first.  I feel .... well, excited.  And then I feel tired.  Let-down.  Longing for a quiet place to think.

[disclaimer:  not everyone is like me.  I know that.  It's okay if you LOVE LOVE LOVE excitement and just can't get enough of the Christmas adrenalin.  I just speak for some of the rest of us:  not everyone is like that, either.]

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Midway through my day, I forgot about the Christmas Eve program that my children would be participating in.  I savored the thought of an evening together, candles and children and movie and popcorn and hopefully someone begging to open just one present, pleeeease?? so that my Farmer and I could say yes.  My very spirit sighed at the respite in sight:  a quiet space, for us to rest in each other.

And then I remembered - oh yes, the program.  The program, for which we would need to eat supper over an hour early so we could get to practice, and keep Lil' Snip up [again!] past his bedtime, and have no time together to savor the last hours before we celebrate Jesus' birth.

Grrrrrrrinch-y thoughts, mine were, dripping with sarcastic accommodation .....

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It's true, though, no one twisted my arm to make me sign Sugar and Spice up for the Christmas play.  And so we went, rushing supper to drive through swirling snowflakes, to arrive in the church parking lot ... before even the director had gotten there.


Reverent music filled the sanctuary, dimly lit with [flameless] candles.  Ahhh ..... !


Peace reigned .... briefly, until more children trickled in, fairly warbling with excitement, and were garbed in appropriate costumes.  There was an excited run-through, excited not-so-quiet whispers in the front pews, and excited shushings.  Family and friends arrived to watch, murmuring excitedly about the weather.  The program was executed just as Christmas Eve children's plays always are:  with enough precious bumbling - and a real baby! - to satisfy all the parents and grandparents in attendance.

Afterward we chatted with a few friends, and then brushed the still-novel snow off our cars to head home.

Tucked excited children into bed by the light of the almost-full moon.  Wrapped that last present and set it under the tree with the others.

And then?  Did we two snuggle on the sofa and contemplate the incarnation, enjoying at last the quiet?  Make room for reverence there in our home?

The truth is, I don't remember.

All I remember from that Christmas Eve night is the few music-and-candle-rich moments in the sanctuary, the magic of children on a spotlit stage, and the wonder of the snow ...

... and that was enough, even for a grinch like me.

Merry (belated) Christmas, and a very happy new year to you all!

goodwill toward men

Today, I went shopping with my children - all four of them, even two- and a half-year-old Lil' Snip, whose strong opinions are not always welcome on outings.

We went to the discount grocery store, and the health food store, and the post office, and the little country store (for specialty cocoa, therefore "the cocoa store" according to the aforementioned toddler), and the library (& its used bookstore), and the big grocery store, and the burger joint.

[I do not, for obvious reasons, attempt this kind of excursion with any regularity!!]

And you know what I discovered, shepherding all four children through seven destinations in the thick of the holiday season?

I live in a friendly town.

People smiled at us.  Held the door.  Wished us a Merry Christmas.  Laughed across the checkout lines.  Offered my children lollipops.  Complimented my handmade scarf.  Let us go first at intersections.  Made jokes with my children.  Struck up conversations about whatever was right in front of us, just out of sheer goodwill.

We were not perfectly behaved.  Spice and Nice were a bit spicy (& not-nicey) at times.  Lil' Snip was singing that famous toddler song that sounds suspiciously like whining, a few times when lunchtime loomed a little too near.

Why was an outing that could have been a challenge, a blessing instead?

Maybe it was Christmas cheer.  

Maybe it was happenstance.  

Maybe it was purely a gift from God.  

I'm tempted to think that it was because I was in a good mood, and did a better job than usual at using my pleasant voice, no matter what.  But I think I'll let the analysis go, for once, and just accept the gift.

I live in a friendly town, where folks, given half a chance, are chatty and helpful - and so, I'll bet, do you.

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Merry Christmas!

O Christmas Tree

Tonight my Farmer put the Christmas tree together (yes, we're one of those) and the excitement in the room was exhilarating (if you like that kind of thing).  I stayed out of the way, catching up on my blog-reading (in which I discovered that two good friends, in two very different parts of the world, just bought/moved into their dream homes.  More later, maybe, on my conflicted internal response.).

Here is how I shared about this precious family bonding time, on facebook:

"It's awful but I don't even like the way they decorate the tree - I know it makes me Terrible Mother of the Year, but I would really love to have a color-coordinated tree, without all the trinket-y ornaments ... true confession."

"So, after they all go to bed, I get to put up the rest of the decorations, where I want them, without excited children dogging my every step, offering helpful choruses of suggestions."

"It's trinkets all the way here (and multi-colored lights- ugh).  And of course the irony is that when they're all grown and gone, and I can do the tree how I want it, I won't want it anymore, and I'll miss their excited gibbering."

Here is what I didn't share on facebook, that happened just a bit later:

Lil' Snip came into the livingroom and, unfazed by my laptop shield, exhorted me to "come see the lights, Mommy!  Come in to this room!!"  (Lil' Snip almost never speaks without exclamation points).

So I came with him, into this room, to behold the ugly multi-colored lights with my son.

The room lights were off, the better to admire their awkward handiwork.  The bottom half of the tree was highly ornamented.  There were dark, unlighted regions where the string of lights had been a little too eager to get to wherever it was going.  And under the tree, as close to the glory as they could get, lay my children.

They invited me to join them.  On the floor.  Under the tree.

So, I did.  I looked up through the branches at the lights, listened to Lil' Snip's nonstop excited commentary about the "sparkly-feeling" tree needles, watched his twinkling eyes reflect red, blue & yellow, and when he drummed his feet on the floor in sheer exhilaration, I joined him and drummed mine.  He looked at me, surprised, and smiled.  "Slowly, Mommy," he told me, slowing his own rhythm down.  Spice yelled "Mommy's having fun!!"

And I was.

They sang Christmas carols - O Come, O Come Emmanuel and Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming and Go, Tell it On The Mountain  - around that ugly, beloved tree.  Lil' Snip gave everyone goodnight hugs and kisses and was trundled off to bed, pleading "can we leave it up?"

The tree is up.  And thanks to the innocent delight of my children, so are my spirits.

I might even let them help decorate the rest of the house, tomorrow.