Dancing around the Christmas tree

A story my mother often told came from the Christmas when I was three. My sister Linda was two, and Karen (I should not forget to mention her) was just a baby. According to my mother she came into the living room one day shortly before Christmas and discovered that the Christmas tree had been pulled away from the wall out into the center of the room. And I had been the one who had done it, because, I said, I wanted to dance around the Christmas tree with Linda. 

I don't remember this happening — how, according to my mother, miraculously, no ornaments fell off the tree and nothing was broken. How she was so astounded she couldn't really administer a scolding. And I've never heard how the tree got moved back into place. 

My mother is known to embroider stories from the family past. I often tell others, believe half of what you hear — I just can't tell you which half. But I am absolutely certain that the part of the story about three-year-old me wanting to dance around the Christmas tree is true. I don't mean "true" in the sense that it might point to a deeper truth. Not at all. There's a picture in my head of little girls in folk dresses, gathered skirts, snug bodices, caps and aprons, lined up and silhouetted at the bottom of a page in the Augsburg Christmas Annual — "The Annual of Christmas Literature and Art" that we girls pored over as Christmas approached. Printed on high-quality paper, the oversized pages were filled with articles about Christmas customs around the world, inspiring stories I could not yet read, and beautifully illustrations of the nativity story. If you looked deep and long into Mary's beautiful face and Joseph's tender eyes, you could imagine in your heart what it was to hold the Baby Jesus, what it was to be there on that most holy night. 

Those girls in their dancing clogs and braids weren't much more than woodcut clip art, filling space at the bottom of a page about something else — butter cookies, perhaps. But to me at three and a half, they seemed to hold the key to a proper Christmas celebration. Maybe there was a tree in that line-up as well, decorated with candles set upright on the tips of the branches in little tin holders. Maybe this is more detail than could possibly have been incorporated in that little picture more than 60 years ago. Maybe my mother is not the only one who embroiders her stories. 

I don't know how Linda and I could have danced around the tree to my satisfaction, just the two of us (though much credit goes to her for faithfully following her big sister — and not for the last time). What dances did we know? What childish steps would have worked with the Robert Shaw Christmas carol recordings that were the sound of Christmas in our house in the 1950s? And we could hardly have encircled the tree. We'd have been more like a little two-car wind-up train chugging around a circular track on the floor.  Though perhaps, if Mother had not come in quite so soon, the dance would have fulfilled my childish dream. I've dreamed many other "perfect Christmas" dreams since that time. They are more perfect, more treasured in memory than they were as tried, too hard sometimes, to bring them into being. 

This year, as last year, Christmas is hard, even without dreams for a perfect celebration. This is what I've been saying to myself all day today. 

Christmas is hard this year, as Linda and I made plans for a COVID-safe Christmas Day with an elderly mother, unvaccinated family members and Zoom. 

Christmas is hard this year, as I click on yet another news story about how quickly the omicron variant is spreading. 

Christmas is hard this year. The aggravations and negativity I manage to sweep aside in the morning come creeping back in the afternoon. I have yet to bake a single cookie, nor have I grated the orange rind for the cranberry bread. I'm drinking white wine from the big bottle opened at Thanksgiving. It's not very good, especially on its own in the evening. 

And my heart is weighed down by news of old friends having sober discussions about cancer and thinking of those who keep vigil with the dying. Sad memories surface. It's hard. 

I subscribe to Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation emails. Some days I even read them. This morning's was an excerpt from a Christmas piece by Kathleen Norris whose writing did much to form my mid-life faith. Here's what spoke to me this morning:

It is precisely because we are weary, and poor in spirit, that God can touch us with hope. This is not an easy truth. It means that we do accept our common lot, and take up our share of the cross. It means that we do not gloss over the evils we confront every day, both within ourselves and without. Our sacrifices may be great. But as the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, once said, it is only the poor and hungry, those who know they need someone to come on their behalf, who can celebrate Christmas.

A proper Christmas celebration takes up the cross. That is where hope appears, right there, in the darkness. 

Hope appears in the care of the poor and hungry for others who are poor and hungry, in the care of the grieving by those who have known grief or who know that someday they surely will. Shreds of hope hang in the anxious or rueful conversations we share with one another, in the mirrored shrugs where we look at one another and acknowledge our lack of wisdom, our vulnerability. 

Hope appears in the Incarnation — not in a glowing halo of divine presence, but most clearly and truly in the smooth and slippery skin of a newborn child, the in-drawing of that first breath, the baby nuzzling his mother's breast, encircled in her arms, who will soon be greeted by rejoicing, dancing shepherds and glittering earthly gifts from the majestic procession of the magi. God with us, like us, on our behalf, so that we can care for one another and celebrate even a hard Christmas, perhaps daring to pull the tree away from the wall for some dancing. There is faith and love and Christmas joy in that circle of hopeful dancers around the tree — if you take the time to look, or better, just let it come. 

The tree in my living room in 2021 is encircled with gifts, wrapped last night. I have a new patchwork Christmas tree skirt this year, also a circle, pieced by me and quilted shortly after Christmas last year by sister Linda. (There's a present for Karen -- she's there, too.) The muslin angel on my tree, made by me in the 1980s, would have pleased my three-year-old self, with embroidered ribbon around her waist and red trim on her skirt and sleeves. 

I dared to move this tree after it was fully decorated, inching it off to the side a bit. Not for dancing, but to make room for my favorite chair, the place where I watch the December sky brighten in the morning and where I look deep into the trees' branches in the evening, seeking peace and hope for a new day.

Second Sunday of Advent

I went out walking yesterday morning. The weather app on my phone said rain from 9 a.m. on, through the afternoon and into the evening. I needed the exercise. So out I went at 8:15 to jam 45 minutes of fitness into my life before getting dressed for Sunday School and church. 

My walks are simple: walk 20 minutes in the "away" direction and then walk back home. Some mornings there are lots of right-angle turns through the grid of urban/suburban streets. Some mornings I walk mostly straight west without making decisions. It was a straight-street day yesterday. I saw a couple of runners  and a few quiet dog-walkers on a grey, grey day. Plus a long-legged walker in a pale orange hoodie, who quickly outpaced me. Brown leaves crunched underfoot -- oak leaves, the last to come down from the trees. 

I was trudging along next to an shoulder-high hedge when something yellow caught my eye. A tiny flower, poking through a mesh of unlit Christmas lights, the kind you drape over bushes, quick and easy coverage, no light strings to untangle later. It was a tiny, perfect forsythia blossom. Not plastic, not silk -- a real flower with a few green leaves on a hedge that was badly out sync with the natural cycle of fall, winter, spring.  

One little flower. An Advent thing. 

Behold, a Branch is growing

Of loveliest form and grace,

As prophets sung, foreknowing;

It springs from Jesse's race

And bears one little Flow'r

In midst of coldest winter,

zAt deepest midnight hour.

"Faith + hope = confidence." This was the formula in the Richard Rohr devotion in my email inbox this morning. Optimism is a gift of temperament, he said. Some of us are wired that way. Confidence is not like patience, which he said can be learned through practice. (I agree. Continual practice.) Confidence, faith plus hope, is a sign of participation in the life of God.

The sun will not rise today until 7:04, about the time I hope to hit the "Publish" button. I'm awake far too early, thinking Monday thoughts and cares. Soon I'll watch the electric candles in the living room window turn off one by one as they sense the morning light. I watched them come on yesterday afternoon, shortly after 3 p.m. -- such a dark and dingy day it was. 

The sky is gray this morning and moving, with a wind advisory. I won't be out walking in a westerly direction. It's chilly enough here in my chair. 

Where is this "life of God" of which mystics speak? Where do I look? 

In the wintry branches moving against the brightening sky? In the disordered flower on the forsythia hedge eight or ten blocks away from my home? In the hope and faith of cancer patients or ALS warriors treasuring life all the more gracefully because they must fight for it? In the laboring woman about to give birth? In the social justice advocates who fight for the dignity of Black lives? 

Somewhere in me? Today? 

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