Peaceful and joyful

Not long after Halloween, a friend described her daughter practicing Christmas carols on the piano. "I know this is early, but it sounds so peaceful and joyful," she wrote.

Perhaps this is true of all writers, but certain words catch my ear in a particular way: a simple phrase that, when dissected, can't possibly be original or unique, but somehow hits me as if it is. "Peaceful and joyful" – it may not quite bear the resonance of t.s. eliot’s "When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table" or Robert Frost’s "The woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep" and yet their pairing jingled in my mind as pleasingly as the Christmas carols must have sounded to my friend when she wrote that.

Peace and joy are words that are often twinned in the holiday season, of course. And surely those two abstract nouns are among the most noble goals to which we might strive. But “peaceful and joyful” are a more tempered version. Adjectives, not nouns, and somehow more modest and relative in nature. Even when the absolutes of peace and joy seem impossibly out of reach, the adjectival forms seem possible: even if we haven’t achieved peace and joy on either the universal or the domestic level, an 11-year-old playing Christmas carols can still be deemed peaceful and joyful.

I liked the phrase so much I decided to adopt it as a holiday season mantra and resolved that everything I choose to do under the umbrella of the holiday season had to fit into one category or the other, or better still into both.

This isn't to say I expect the entire month of December to be peaceful and joyful for me. There are other things I'll still need to do -- like buying groceries, and folding laundry, and commuting to work -- that may seem neither peaceful or joyful. But anything I opt to do in the name of the holiday season -- any party I attend, any gift-buying excursion I embark upon, any hours spent creating the perfect holiday newsletter -- are hereby required to fit into at least one of the two categories.

It’s a little simplistic as a benchmark, I realize. Peace and joy should be hallmarks of everyone’s holiday season, and for that matter, everyone’s non-holiday season as well. And I’m sure I’ll still find myself standing in a long checkout line or baking Christmas cookies at midnight at some point this month, feeling neither peaceful nor joyful. But I still like those guidelines. Peaceful. Or joyful. Maybe even both. As a way of approaching the holiday season, it just sounds right.

My holiday season indulgence: A night of middle school music

I have many friends whose idea of self-indulgence during the holiday season involves pedicures, massages, or long lunches at fine restaurants.

Mine is a lot more low-budget. My yearly December indulgence is attending the middle school holiday concert.

Last night, just as with every year, someone I run into in the audience is bound to look at the stage, look down at their program, and say in a slightly puzzled tone, “So Tim is in the chorus this year…? Or Holly is playing with the jazz band….?”

Their puzzlement is justified. Neither of my kids is in any musical group associated with the school (or any musical group not associated with the school, unless you count Holly hiphop-dancing on her bed while blasting her iPod), and they can’t imagine why I’d bother to spend a whole evening during the busiest time of year attending a school concert if neither of my kids will be on stage.

But that’s just what makes it an indulgence: I’m under no obligation whatsoever to be there. I go just because I so enjoy hearing talented kids sing and play instruments, and I get such a kick out of seeing them all so dressed up and engaged in the moment of performance. As they file onto the stage, pick up their instruments, train their gaze on the conductor, bow to the audience’s applause….it’s such a different view of the same kids whom I normally see thundering in and out of the school cafeteria or swarming the soccer field or jostling each other in line at the ice cream stand. This is the side of them that foretells a different kind of future ahead: one in which they know how to carry themselves with dignity, dress formally, follow someone else’s lead in order to create magnificent results.

So I go to the yearly holiday concert because it’s such a pleasure to witness this, but also because in some small way, I feel like it’s an important exercise in conquering the tendency to rush through the holiday season. Yes, there were many things I could have been doing with those same two hours, many items that would be crossed off my To Do list today if I’d skipped the concert. I might have made some progress with holiday baking. I might have mopped the kitchen floor. I might have packaged the gifts that need to be mailed to Colorado by this weekend. Or I might have finished writing the couple of articles that are due today.

But it’s good sometimes to renounce your To Do list, especially during the holiday season. There was no reason for me to spend two hours at the concert, but I did anyway. I heard some good music, witnessed talent both great and still developing, and made it a priority not to be bustling around in the usual holiday season way. No, it’s not a pedicure or a fancy night out: just a free evening of music in the school auditorium. But I’m really glad I was there.

O Christmas card, O Christmas card....

Due to various circumstances -- most of which fall under the category of personal laziness -- I hadn't been to the post office in three consecutive days when my 9-year-old and I finally stopped by yesterday afternoon. Our post office box was packed with envelopes. The two of us unstuffed it piece by piece, hauled the load home, and spent a very pleasant half-hour opening Christmas cards. As I should have realized, if you're going to take a three-day hiaitus from collecting your mail, mid-December is not the optimal time to do it; on a typical day during the holiday season, we receive as much personal mail as we often receive in an entire month or more at other times of year.

But it was worth it, because catching up on the trove of cards that had arrived during that time was so much fun. I know a lot of people don't enjoy Christmas cards as much as I do, but for me it's a hallmark of the season. And even though lots of satirists have fun poking fun at the different strains of holiday greetings, I can only say that I like them all. I like the posed, professionally produced family portraits. I like the funny offbeat candid snapshots of kids running through pumpkin patches or digging sand castles. I like those taken in people's back yards and those taken at the far reaches of the earth. I like seeing what people did in Disney World, at Niagara Falls, on Mount Kilimanjaro, in the Caribbean. I like those that were clearly intended to be Christmas cards as the shot was composed and those that have more of an "I guess this one will do" feel to them.

I like holiday newsletters, too. I don't mind when people go on and on about every twist and turn in their family's year. Perhaps because personal stories and how people tell them are such an integral part of my career, I'm interested not only in the facts people include but the subtext about what they chose to say and why. One of my friends wrote a fairly long newsletter but had exactly one paragraph about each child and one detail amplified in that one paragraph: a daughter learned to drive; a son started working at his school's radio station; another daughter is going to be in a play soon. How did she choose those singular details?, I wondered. Were there other ideas that she cast aside?

A few details that friends have chosen to include in the past struck me as unusual enough that I still remember them years later. One friend broke the news of her divorce, apologizing ahead of time for breaking the unspoken rule of including only good news in Christmas cards. Two different women I know who are both mothers of men in their 20's routinely discuss the goings-on of their sons' girlfriends, which I find a little odd -- these aren't even members of the family. But it's still interesting. One of my husband's childhood friends even once started a Christmas card with "Thank God that for once we don't have to start with the news that Tina is pregnant."

Our own Christmas card situation has me annually tearing my hair out. I decided the first year Rick and I were married to write a 12-stanza poem describing our year. It was a fun way to narrate events, and I discovered that the kind of people who complain in general about holiday newsletters don't seem to mind poems because of the poems' innate tongue-in-cheek quality: we're not boasting about anything, we're just trying to come up with rhyming couplets. After we’d done two years of holiday poems, a friend of my mother very offhandedly told me an anecdote about a young woman she knew who had done the same thing for a few years but then found it too hard to maintain the tradition. Needless to say, I took this as a challenge, and that's the primary reason that our holiday poem continues to exist nineteen years later. Now a small number of our friends even write little rhymes back to us.

In the past, we threw in a photo card as well, assuming that some recipients would read the poem, some would look at the card, and some might do neither. (Or both.) But as home-computer technology has improved, the cost of commercial printing has gone up, and the environmental impact of photographic dyes and materials has come into question, we ceased ordering glossy photos and just started embedding small snapshots into our newsletter.

It's one of those traditions I love for about 11 1/2 months out of the year, and then dread when it's time to start writing. But as with any big writing project I face, the sense of relief I have when it's behind me makes all the stress seem worthwhile. As Holly and I pored over the pile of cards we received yesterday, I thought about how those same people would be receiving ours in another few days. I hope they enjoy our work as much as I've enjoyed theirs. Because every single card I receive means something to me, and I hope it's a tradition that never stops.

Unseasonably warm

It seems that people generally fall into two camps regarding the unseasonably warm weather with which December of 2011 has begun. Some, like my friend Jenn, are saying “The holiday season just isn’t the same without frosty air and snowflakes. Where’s the weather to set the mood? When can we say it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas?” Others are just happy to be catching what feels like a little reprieve before true winter kicks in.

In past years, December has been a cold and snowy month, though last year’s epic snow accumulation didn’t begin in earnest until the day after Christmas. Nonetheless, this week’s temperatures in the sixties seem to mean something to everyone, whether positive or negative.

I’m a little reticent to admit it, but at the moment, I fall into the reprieve camp. I say “reticent” because relishing the unseasonably warm weather makes me feel, well, old. There was a time when I found snowstorms romantic; frigid mornings inspiring; icy ponds and frost-crusted branches magical. But that time was decades ago, when the driveway seemed to magically plow itself and the ultimate crowning touch to a snowy day was a school cancellation the next morning.

There are still plenty of things I like about winter weather. Snowshoeing, for one thing; and I’m looking forward to snowshoeing even more this winter because of all the trails near our new house. I like the surprise of getting to sleep a little bit late because school is closed and the kids don’t have to catch the bus. I like watching Tim and Holly go sledding together. I like the way the fields and woods throughout our town look when blanketed with snow.

And perhaps it’s only because I’m so sure all of that will still come within the next few months – or maybe weeks – that it’s easy for me to say I’m enjoying this unseasonably mild weather. But the fact is, temperatures in the 60’s or even 40’s, with the ground still dry, simply make life easier than deep snow and crusty ice. Last night was our annual town tree lighting. For the past several years, the weather has been uniformly freezing for that event: adults stamp their feet and dab at their runny noses while kids run in circles to stay warm while we sing carols and wait for Santa’s arrival by firetruck. True, it’s a little harder to be in the Santa mood when you can stand outside during the tree lighting in a sweater rather than a parka, but it still seemed like an easier evening overall this year than it has recently.

The weather is expected to change in the next day or two, and maybe then I’ll finally get some Christmas shopping and decorating done. Snow and cold are definitely a catalyst to getting into the holiday mood, as I learned when we had a foot of snow in late October and Holly started talking about her Christmas wish list even though it wasn’t yet Halloween. “It feels like Christmas!” she said on that October 30, and it did. Now it feels like September. But September is a beautiful month, and I’m going to breathe deeply of the mild damp air and enjoy it just a little more before I have to dig boots and gloves out of the basement for another long winter.

Secular reflections on Advent

Advent in the religious sense was not a concept I was familiar with as a child. I knew about advent calendars – my sisters and I shared one every December, some years with pictures and some years with chocolate – but I thought they were just a way of literally counting down the days to Christmas, meting out the excitement and anticipation. This made plenty of sense to me; I can also remember years when my sisters and I counted down the hours until our birthdays on the day immediately preceding it, and this felt the same, though on a different timeline.

Only recently did I come to understand, or at the very least catch a glimmer of understanding of, the genuine symbolism of Advent. When my children and I started attending the Unitarian Universalist church here in town about seven years ago, I heard the words spoken over the lighting of the advent candle each of the four Sundays before Christmas, and understood for the first time that Advent wasn’t just counting down the days until Christmas burst on the scene but rather a profound observance of waiting, hope and expectation.

This year, Holly and I were invited to be the Advent candle lighters for the very first week of Advent. Holly lit the candle, while I read the traditional words: “We light this first candle for the Hope of Advent. May it kindle in us hearts full of expectation.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of Advent ever since that last Sunday in November. The weeks before Christmas do indeed have such a sense of wondrous expectation. There’s still the spirit with which I understood Advent from the advent calendar when I was Holly’s age, of course: the wondrous expectation of Christmas presents – both giving and receiving – and the arrival of Santa Claus. And at the other extreme is the wondrous expectation of devout Christians: awaiting the birth of their Savior. But many of us fall between those two endpoints. We are waiting to see how our holiday expectations may or may not be met: whether the family gatherings or vacations will go as we hope, whether the parties will be as merry as planned, whether the meticulously purchased or crafted gifts will be received with delight. Some are waiting for the return of a family member: from college, from far away, from military service. In the case of our minister, whose first grandchild was born earlier this week, the Advent was literal this year: she and her family were joyfully awaiting a birth as the weeks of Advent unspooled.

To me, the air itself feels full of quiet waiting. Not necessarily waiting for something wonderful and thrilling, but for something unknown. It’s been very cold this week, and there’s no snow: the ground is hard and amazingly still. The earth seems to await snow, in the same way that there are people right now awaiting news, information, reasons for optimism, answers. And it confirms that the process of waiting can be in itself a spiritual act.

Contemporary spiritual writer Edward Hays, author of A Pilgrim’s Almanac, wrote this: Life is a constant Advent season: we are continually waiting to become, to discover, to complete, tofulfill. Hope, struggle, fear, expectation and fulfillment are all part of our Advent experience.

Yes: that’s true all year long, and for the four weeks preceding December perhaps most notably. The earth where we are right now is still, cold, and quiet, and there are many things to anticipate, to await, to wonder if they will arrive.

It's time to make the candy

For a variety of reasons, I admit that I was resisting the arrival of December. I wanted fall to last forever this year. I even dreamed over the weekend that I was teaching a kindergarten class; the children were insisting it was time to decorate the classroom tree while I was trying to tell them the activity for the day would be carving a pumpkin. (The fact that our public school system would allow neither of these activities in the classroom had little impact on my subconscious.)

Nonetheless, December arrived without my permission and in spite of my pervasive anxiety that in myriad ways I’m not ready for the holiday season.

And then yesterday at the supermarket a little spark went off as I stood in the baking aisle. You may be feeling really resistant to the idea of shopping and wrapping and getting ready for the church pageant and helping at the Greens Sale and planning the Christmas Day schedule, a voice in my head said, but don’t forget about making candy! That’s always fun.

Right. That is always fun. In fact, it’s one of my favorite yearly traditions: filling up my kitchen with the aromas of melting butter and chocolate as I arrange ingredients all over the countertop and turn out pan after pan of confections: chocolate truffles, nut brittle, peppermint bark, toffee, peanut butter balls.

So I stocked my grocery cart with nuts, chocolate chips, corn syrup, all the ingredients I’d need for this annual practice. Candy-making is one of the things I love about the holiday season. I love how easy it is to make all these different candies, and I love the fact that unlike cookies, candy-making is still seen as a novelty, something unexpected and unusual. It’s also both easier and neater than baking, in my opinion: no flour settling in a fine dust over every surface; no cookies cooling on racks. Most of my candy recipes take minutes to stir up, and use fewer than half a dozen ingredients.

So last night I swung into action. By the time I went to bed, one hundred cocoa-dusted truffles were cooling in the fridge. And this was only the first day of the month. True, I have nothing to wear to holiday parties this year and I’m feeling a little sad that both my sisters will be in Europe rather than at our house for Christmas as they and their families usually are. But my kitchen is already filling up with candy, and just falling into the familiar rhythms of boiling and stirring reminds me of this most beloved yearly tradition.

A month of holiday festivities

One of my family’s favorite children’s books about Christmas is Christmas in Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren. Better known as the author of the Pippi Longstocking books, Lindgren re-creates the festivities in a small Swedish farming village, as seen through the eyes of one little girl who celebrates with her brothers, parents, grandfather and neighbors.

While there are several elements that the characters’ observance has in common with ours – like them, we bake cookies, decorate a tree, talk about Santa, partake of a feast or two, and even live on a similarly configured farm -- one small detail in the book brings a smile to my face every time I read it. “I’m going to tell you how we celebrate Christmas,” the young narrator declares, and then offers the first step. “Three days before Christmas, we bake ginger snaps.”

Three days before Christmas? I find myself thinking each time. That’s when you begin preparing? I suppose it’s admirable that they manage to proceed with business as usual for the first 21 days of the month, but it also sounds a little abstemious. For us, there’s usually one or two solid days of rest after Thanksgiving and then it’s time to swing into Christmas mode.

But unlike holiday decorations in the drugstore in October, starting in on the Christmas theme soon after Thanksgiving doesn’t bother me. I think it’s fun to draw the festivities out, and four weeks never seems like an inordinate amount of time to me. Regardless of which winter holidays you celebrate, December is a really special time, a fact that struck me anew three years ago when I’d just re-entered the professional workplace. The corporate environment seems like it would be the last place where you’d feel overcome with holiday spirit, but the influx of vendors’ gifts and company party invitations underscored for me how welcome a break the jolliness of December provides from the rest of the year. Even if the baskets of cookies that the vendors send aren’t that tasty and the office parties can be more rote than meaningful, I love the fact that there’s a sense of universal agreement that this is the month for frivolity. Though it might be somewhat removed from the Christian meaning of Christmas, I really appreciate the idea that December is when we’ve generally all agreed to eat more decadently, socialize with more people, and indulge in more superfluous spending than we might at other times of year.

So our holiday observances start early in the month and extend all the way to New Year’s. Although the narrator of Christmas in Noisy Village makes the last-minute bustle of cookie baking and tree cutting sound merry, I like being able to enjoy each component without any rush. Earlier this week I took part in a holiday cookie exchange, at which 14 women each made several dozen cookies and then we went around buffet-style and made up plates using a little of each, which was a wonderful way to kick off the holiday season. Next week we’ll attend our town’s tree lighting and Tim’s holiday concert. The following Saturday we’ll buy our tree and decorate our house in preparation for the big party we host every year for the nonprofit board on which I sit. (Filling up the house with delicious food and appreciative guests is one of my favorite ways to celebrate Christmas.) We’ll take part in our church pageant and our Christmas Eve children’s service too. Weather permitting, we have an annual tradition of walking to church on that day.

No one in my family is particularly fond of shopping. Of course, we can’t bypass that part altogether, but we’ll avoid it as much as we can. We’ll make candy for the kids’ teachers, pick up a Dunkin Donuts gift card for their bus driver, and do some other creative projects for other gift recipients. Speaking of creativity, it’s about time for us to do our annual Christmas card photo shoot. Light snow is predicted for this weekend, which will make for a pretty background. Last year we got the kids, the dog and two cows in one tight frame; maybe this year we can wedge in a couple of sheep as well. And then there’s the beloved-but-dreaded task of drafting our Christmas card poem, a 12-stanza extravaganza intended to commemorate the whole year in iambic pentameter. It’s an exercise in writer’s anxiety when I sit down to do it, but being done with it always gives me a grand sense of accomplishment.

And one of my very favorite parts of the season comes tonight. Our church puts on a greens sale the first Saturday of December every year, and on Friday evening volunteers prepare for it by setting up all the boughs, wreaths and other forms of greenery. The function hall fills up with the scent of pine, and the display tables glitter with decorations for the wreaths: bells, ribbons, bows.

I always manage to be one of the last to leave just so I can spend a moment in the darkened hall, surrounded by the evergreens – taking in the tranquility, because that too is part of the holiday season, and so different from the merry chaos of the fair itself the following morning. Shopping and hand-crafting; feasting and baking; bustle and tranquility; spirituality and frivolity. It’s a season of contrasts. All of it worth treasuring, all month long.