It’s mid-December, and my house is full of sweets.
This is our advent, and its festive elements will accrue, as we concoct more sweets and rich savories served only at Christmas, as we trim our tree, and as, with that blend of awe, excitement, and logistical frustration, we re-engineer all our flat surfaces to proclaim the joyous season. The Christmas in our house beckons to us, alluding to a peaceful solemnity fraught with meaning. Allusions, though, have that disheartening propensity to evanesce just as we try to articulate them, the speed of their flight proportional to the vigor with which we grasp after them. If we pursue them too hard – and what grownup doesn’t reach for the Christmas spirit as one once listened for reindeer bells on Christmas Eve? – we grasp only doubt and find emptiness filling the soul we hoped would find joy, reminding us of the guilt and disorientation that we modern human consumers seemingly cannot escape, or certainly ought not try to escape. Humbug.
This advent season has been like many others. We struggled to get the house cleaned – our daily lives being too busy to keep up with this task – in time for the scheduled tree trimming. We bought groceries, lots of groceries, to feed the Christmas baking machine and provision the feast. We also started the baking, eventually adding six batches of cookies to the four of candy we made Friday after Thanksgiving. We decorated our tree, consuming homemade eggnog – Grandma called it “custard” – as we worked at it. And we hoped all the things would engender communion and good cheer, that the solemn displays of the birth of Christ would open in us an awareness of the mysteries of life, that altogether we would know joy.
But will we know joy? Will we understand more about living well? Will we recognize what is truly of value? Will we know redemption?
Each year, I navigate the season with a broad sense of purpose, yet, year after year, my appreciation of it all is laced with a kind of existential discomfort. I want to believe in meaning. I want to “honour Christmas in my heart keep it all the year,” but to keep it I must know it. So this December, when the flower in full bloom, I want to be so deeply touched by rich experience that my being will resonate with the geist – the Weihnachtsgeist. (Can you hear Alfred chortling?) I want to know this thing of shimmering beauty as I have not known it before, and I want to gaze toward it from stark winter days, lush spring days, hot summer days, and melancholy fall days and feel it touch me once more.
We all, each year, mostly, as Scrooge suggests to his nephew Fred, “leave it alone.” This year, I want to know how to keep it well.
-Hannah Grachien, December 23, 2020