December 2019
Our bay window this December does not sparkle with the usual Christmas tree. Our mantel is not festooned with greenery and candles. The Santa Claus collection remains in its plastic tub along with silk poinsettias and ceramic angels. Between our Thanksgiving and Christmas travels there is only enough time and energy for best choices. What, we asked ourselves, would we display? A poinsettia, reindeer dolls, a wood sculpture of Gabriel blowing his horn, a winter painting, a small sculpted crèche puzzle, and a stuffed quintet of Old Saint Nicks.
Thus inspired we asked ourselves: What if our holiday moments could also be trimmed—to a few precious memories—what would they be? Revealing an economy associated with aging, the longevity of generations, and faithful practice, we chose these four events
A large orange given out on Christmas Eve at a rural Presbyterian church. Oranges in Herb’s Kansas childhood were a rare and delicious treat. This must have also been true for my father and mother, for an orange was always at the bottom of my Christmas stocking, along with some walnuts to crack. Our children also received an easy to peel orange or tangerine in their stockings on Christmas morning. One year a grandchild asked, Why do you always put tangerines in our stockings when we can just go into the kitchen and get one? It’s not exactly about the fruit, we answered.
Candlelight services on Christmas Eve. The singing of Silent Night with candles held high expresses reverence and love, the light’s reflections merging faces, holding them in holiness. We anticipate this vision every Christmas Eve. You may recall that in 1914 an unofficial Christmas truce occurred along the Western Front. Following the truce, German Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch recalled: “How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.”. A candlelight service acts as a truce in our own discordant lives. To hold the candle aloft and sing is a truly simple act, void of complications, bursting with spiritual and historical significance.
Baking Cookies. Every December Herb bakes dozens of cookies, their aromas of chocolate, fruit, and nuts sweetening our home. The cookies go to our loved ones and to shut ins. He was inspired by his Aunt Marianne who baked in her farm kitchen over a hundred dozen cookies every year until she couldn’t. Her cookies were delivered to the local nursing home, the church, and the homes of friends and family. The other day I walked into the house to the delicious aroma of almond biscotti and oatmeal raisin cookies. The baking had begun, and so had allusions to bright woolen mittens, hot chocolate, jingle bells, and caroling. Cookies and caroling go together. The caroling might be off key but the cookies will be yummy.
Making gifts. One year we worked together to make eight crèches. I drew the patterns of tiny people and animals, Herb cut out the forms with his jig saw, and I painted them. Because we ran out of time, we never finished one for ourselves. An unfinished crèche awaits assembly in a drawer in my studio. It would be good to assemble the unfinished pieces, repeat the act of attention to symbols and meaning.
Although imagination was necessary, our hands made these memories of the heart. We like what Rabbi Johnathan Sacks says about optimism and hope: “Optimism is the belief that things are going to get better. Hope is the belief that we can make things better.” [quoted in TheBulwark.com, requoted in The Week, December 13, 2019.]
We lean on ancient prophesies, impatient with their centennial evolutions, our hands making tiny contributions, the results usually invisible, except in our imagination or as confirmed in history. Civilization improves at an erratic and sluggish pace, requires courage and ingenuity, depends upon intentional living, reason and faith. To participate we must suspend fears. Disrupters have always existed. Consider these: Isaiah, Jesus of Nazareth, Genghis Kahn, King Henry VIII, Mahatma Gandhi. Which ones worked toward a peaceable kingdom, acting not for themselves but under a higher authority for others? It is within that hope for a peaceable kingdom that our hands work.
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them.
—Isaiah 11:6
Diiggings 